When the forewoman leaned over the bench in court 20 of the Criminal Courts of Justice just after 3pm on July 6th and handed Judge Mícheál O’Higgins the verdict, he thanked her and began to read.
The counts were then read out: guilty, guilty, guilty.
Former Olympic swimming coach and television pundit George Gibney, who was extradited to Ireland from Florida last summer, was found to have committed 39 counts of indecent assault and one count of attempted rape against four children.
The current generation of six men and six women jurors finally gave the victims of Gibney a sense of justice, something a previous generation were unable do following hearings in 1993.
They delivered their guilty verdict on a man whom barrister James Dwyer described as “a powerful figure in swimming in the 1970s” and a “predatory abuser taking advantage of young girls with impunity”.
Inside the courtroom Tric Kearney sat among the benches. Outside in the corridor Ber Carley sat with her family.
Both women were there to support the four who gave evidence this time and to bear witness to justice finally unfolding for them after their case had perished in the Supreme Court 33 years ago.
Both were also instrumental in bringing international attention to Gibney’s long-standing crimes against children and were – along with swimmers Chalkie White and European-medal winner Gary O’Toole – central witnesses in the initial case that began in Dún Laoghaire District Court in 1993 where Gibney’s first appearance in court began with a bang.
The car transporting Gibney to court that day was involved in a crash on Dún Laoghaire’s main street and the ensuing chaos ensured anything but a quiet arrival.
That trial finished later that year when the Supreme Court concluded that because of the length of time that had elapsed and the lack of specificity of charges that Gibney should go free.
The decision was not appealed by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
The guilty verdict this time involved an entirely different group of women who had made complaints to the Garda. It highlighted how times had dramatically changed with the gradual alteration of the law over the years and the acceptance of decades-old evidence.
It is highly likely too that the current case would not have been heard if not for the podcast of a series – Where is George Gibney? – in 2018 from the Second Captains podcasting team in conjunction with the BBC.
Following the initial 40-minute podcast, there was such a positive reaction that 11 episodes were made, which were downloaded millions of times in 160 countries.
Not only did the series bring the issue sharply into a global public gaze as Gibney lived life as a free man in the United States, but it drew out new witnesses who had not before come forward.
The podcast did what all the other coverage regarding Gibney could not do: it moved the dial allowing the Garda to build a brand-new case.
Those women who came forward and presented Gibney with a whole new legal challenge were the individuals who finally got him back to Ireland and put him in prison.
However, during the criminal trial at the end of June and early July it was not always straightforward.
On day four of the trial defence counsel Patrick Gageby brought up the lapse-of-time issue. One of the complainants, abused in the 1970s, made a first disclosure to her fiance in 1993 when she was 31 years old.
The prosecution argued case law that a lapse of more than 20 years was admissible if it was made on the first reasonable opportunity as opposed to the first possible opportunity.
It continued that a hastier complaint may carry more weight, but lapses are legitimate and the courts recognise that it takes victims time to make a complaint.
In 1994 the court system did not accept the 27 counts against Gibney of indecent assault and unlawful carnal knowledge of minors, yet in 2026 it accepted similar charges, some of which happened in the 1970s and were 50 years old.
Gibney pleaded guilty to five charges of indecent assault at the beginning of the trial, an admission that took the prosecution by surprise. He had initially faced 79 counts that were whittled down. Importantly, the more serious charge of attempted rape remained.
Throughout the trial, it became clear there were many stunning similarities between the complaints first made in 1994 and those made weeks ago. They concerned Gibney’s modus operandi, his favoured places to bring the children to assault them and his cold indifference afterwards.
What was his demeanour, one complainant was asked after Gibney had attempted to rape her.
“Nonchalant – no different whatsoever,” she replied.
The same words, places and phrases repeatedly cropped up: Trojan Swimming Club; Glenalbyn Swimming Club; babysitting at his house in Killiney, south Dublin; stopping to give lifts to the girls leaving school; or walking and cycling home from swimming.
“Gibney would stop and offer a lift,” said one complainant. “The bike went in the back.”
He would then molest her less than a mile up the road.
There were places he returned to over and over again: the changing rooms by the swimming pool in Newpark Sports Complex, his office adjacent to the pool, the sauna, an old nearby derelict building called Avonmore, a car park in a local hospital.
He also charmed the children’s parents; one remembered how he helped decorate her house along with her father, papering a difficult part of the wall.
Then there was his brazen, calculated nature and almost casual deviance as he strolled through the changing rooms while the girls were undressing.
A risk taker and predator, he continuously groomed the children by playing with their minds.
He moved them into different groups up and down the ladder, suggested they could one day compete in the Olympic Games if they followed his guidance. He lavished attention on them.
They were in his good books one day and his bad books the next. The power disparity was immense; he was in his late 20s and they were as young as nine.
“I was in [school named] national school,” said one complainant. “I believe it was fourth class, halfway through fourth class.”
Gibney was shameless and audacious. One claimant on day eight of the trial described how her mother had enrolled her in a sports camp in the summer of 1975. On one of the days, Gibney ordered her out from the large group in the school gym to a different location in the changing rooms at the swimming pool.
“I went with him thinking it was to clear things up, pick up floats,” she said.
In the changing room, he ordered her to take off her clothes before performing sexual acts, including attempted rape – an offence for which he was found guilty.
“I was 12 years of age. It wouldn’t fit. Whatever,” she said.
“He pulled his trousers back up and left. I was very angry and confused and felt disgusting.”
When he had finished the assault, he ordered her back to the gym but instead she ran from the changing room and in a petrified dash pushed a teacher from the school into the pool.
Noticing she had not returned to the group, her sister went to look for her and found her alone, vexed, greatly agitated and unable to speak, but mumbling incoherently.
She was suspended from the camp for pushing the teacher into the pool. Her mother kept the letter of suspension and it was used in evidence.
Another claimant described how Gibney worked his way into the affections of her mother and father. During a visit to her house one summer evening, he left the company of the parents, who were in the sittingroom below, and entered her bedroom upstairs.
Despite her sister sharing the double bed, Gibney molested her before returning to the company of her parents. She saw a silhouette coming into the room, she said.
“The body of an adult. I recognised his voice,” she said.
“I’m certain I was in secondary school, 13 or 14. He put his hands on my breasts and down to my legs. I was lying on my back.”
The defence took this incident as being so utterly audacious that it could not have been true.
The jury disagreed.
Gibney casually molested the children in the changing rooms, repeatedly putting his hands under their swimsuits. He did the same in his car after they accepted lifts, then grossly assaulted them.
“Good Catholic Ireland. What was I doing to Brona [Gibney’s wife]. How dare I,” recalled one witness explaining the self-recrimination she felt and her confusion over the sense of guilt and that she was somehow to blame.
After he assaulted her in his office, she went home and never swam again.
A figure climbing in stature in Irish swimming – Gibney was later to become a two-time Olympic coach at the Los Angeles and Seoul Olympic Games in 1984 and 1988 – his sense of being untouchable was so bloated that some weeks later he inquired after the girl he assaulted in his office through her parents, wondering if she was ever going to come back to swimming.
While he was molesting her in that attack, the young girl could see her mother through the threadbare curtains that covered the windows on one side of the office. She was sitting in the car waiting to drive her daughter home.
Family connections were not a barrier. Gibney molested a brother and sister who testified in the 1993 terminated trial. He also abused two sisters who gave evidence in this trial.
During the evidence, Gibney sat at the side of the court each day, in the same place, facing the jury. The judge sat to this right. Gibney’s expression remained blank, unchanging.
Wearing the same red shell suit top and grey tracksuit bottoms for each hearing, the 77-year-old paedophile appeared dissolute, looking like a beaten docket.
In summing up, Dwyer, the prosecution barrister, asked the jury to imagine what he called “an extraordinary image”.
He relayed what one of the complainants had said in evidence: of walking around the rugby pitches of the school she attended during break-time with two of her close friends, who both gave evidence.
Without having the vocabulary to explain – or the comprehension to understand what Gibney was doing to her – the three children discussed whether you could get pregnant from having sperm in your mouth and it travelling into your stomach.
At the end, when O’Higgins uttered the words: “Mr Gibney, I remand you in custody until sentencing,” there was a palpable sense of a long and harrowing journey concluding, but also of justice being done arriving and accountability being delivered.
On Monday, the judge delivered his sentence, jailing Gibney for 15½ years.
Gibney’s jailing won’t scrub clean the pain of what happened. It was clear from the evidence and cross examinations that the cost to the women, now in their 60s, of reliving the assaults clearly took an emotional toll.
But like those who preceded them in 1994, none of the four complainants faltered, but they instead brought painful endurance, courage and agency to a jury that heard them.
That was their superpower. This time there was a better outcome.