She might have stepped from a medieval painting. The soft, deep, dark eyes, the clear, pale skin, the long, tumbling, chestnut curls. And the stillness - not of an uncomfortable kind, but of a serenity born out of stoicism and suffering.
There is still something different, apart, about Sophia McColgan. A college lecturer saw it years ago: "She was like the Blessed Virgin in a play, lovely, almost otherworldly." But these days, to hear her joyous, easy laugh ring out is to know that Sophia is positively of this world. Neither a victim nor survivor, she insists, "just an ordinary person the same as the next". That is her triumph. And it is what makes Sophia's Story - written in typically courageous, closely-researched and sensitive style by journalist, Susan McKay - not merely bearable but uplifting. It is a story of the triumph of the human spirit, a journey from Stygian darkness into light, filled with insights, inspiration and enlightenment, even perhaps, with a happy ending.
But at what a price . . .
Sophia's Story falls open on the photograph of a solemn, little girl in white, small hands joined in prayer, walking up for her First Communion; an image almost too much to bear. Shortly before, on a beautiful sunny day in the woods at Derreen Bog, her father had subjected her to the first of the relentless, excruciating defilements that would obliterate her childhood and all her precious, growing years, during which "every orifice of her body" would be "invaded", as the High Court would hear, too many years later.
That first violation left her petrified, speechless, distraught. "I remember going into the chapel. There was a moment to make a prayer for the future. I wished and wished that this would end and I could be happy. I was six."
Seventeen years later, when she would finally give a statement to Sligo gardai, her memory for dates seemed incredible. "But I remember because I knew this happened before my First Holy Communion, or that was when I started at the Ursuline - all the events of my life had memories of abuse attached to them."
Which sums up the sadistic cunning of Joe McColgan, a man capable of planning his most barbaric abuses and humiliations to coincide precisely with the sweetest childhood celebrations and rites of passage.
For Sophia, the birth of a sibling was marked by a particularly violent rape in her father's bed. The night she started to menstruate, she was horribly humiliated before being kicked around the house.
His Nazi-style interrogations, the systematic batterings, the depraved sexual demands on both sons and daughters, have been well documented. His raging, inner demons never rested until 2 a.m. or 3 .a.m. until "someone bled, or got sick or peed on the floor"; until every inmate of his little prison had been mentally and physically pummelled into small, pain-wracked, frozen creatures.
In that pathetic little group, she includes her mother Patsy: "She was one of us", a "hostage", another broken reed, kicked so savagely during one pregnancy, recalls Sophia, "that I saw her haemorrhaging through a chair onto the floor . . . I thought she was going to die".
The book includes pictures of a nine-year-old Sophia as a hospital patient with the familiar shy smile, referred there as "a battered child" with a broken nose; images made doubly poignant by the fact that she was smiling because she thought she was safe at last. At the same time, Patsy was begging social workers to take all her children away to safety. But Sophia's, it turned out, was just the first of the processions to casualty.
And for the professionals - with a few honourable exceptions - issues of confidentiality, McColgan's parental rights and the sacrosanct notion of keeping the family together at all costs seemed to override everything. "They adopted the fire brigade effect," Sophia says now, "they put out the flames, not what caused the fire."
Neighbours, if they noticed anything, turned a blind eye.
A woman who worked in the area 20 years ago told a social worker: "We all knew what was going on." A man near the mountain land where much of the abuse occurred encapsulated it all, when approached by Sophia for his memories: "Arra, Sophie, he was good to me . . . I wouldn't want to say anything against the man." But what did he think about what her father had done to his children? "Well, that was desperate," he said, before adding, "according to what was in the papers, anyway." That response - the note of disbelief, the instinct to protect the "bossman" - devastated her. After the trial, amid a national outpouring of sympathy, cards, flowers and Mass bouquets, she noted that only one neighbour had thought to send a card, wishing them well.
Meanwhile, a visiting missioner came to church to preach about violence in the home. His advice to victims? "Hang on in there . . . Persevere, Persevere."
Through the deep, dark eyes of a brutalised child, Sophia's Story provides a rare, agonising glimpse of how it feels to place your trust in grown-ups, only to realise that no one is coming to save you and that only you, and you alone, can save your family from a monster that no one else, however grown-up or educated or powerful, seems able to touch.
"What - with my background - did I know?" she asks now. "All I had were my few books and my plan to get a degree to take the system on myself." That belief, that she was all that stood between family survival and her father's knife, would remain with her until she was 21, when she finally got her degree. Her younger sister, nearly killed after her father rammed her with his motorbike, would be the first to make a statement. By then, they were all deep into post traumatic stress disorder.
While writing Sophia's Story, Susan McKay - a founder of the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre - also grappled with the issues around male violence, analysing the latest research around the abuse of women and children. (For example, in one study of sexually abused children, 85 per cent of the women had experienced domestic violence from the same man).
She outlines the dynamics which keep abuse victims in petrified silence, even into adulthood, and why Patsy McColgan, far from "colluding" with her husband, was virtually destroyed by him. "One of the things I'm very pleased about is that Patsy told me about how she felt. I wanted people to think again about the attitudes they have about violence against women," says McKay. "It's a hard one to come to terms with for some people - that Sophia believes her mother was as helpless as the children."
"I think my mother's is the saddest story in the book," says Sophia. "He had sucked out her entrails and she was just a husk . . . She looked out through a wall of tears and all was darkness."
Patsy McColgan had no precedent for such an experience. She was the daughter of good, loving parents - generous, committed presences in her and her children's lives who were forced to back off for fear that Joe McColgan would, as he frequently promised, kill someone.
Possibly the most tragic line in Sophia's Story is the infinite sense of loss and pleading in what Patsy McColgan has to say now about her children: "What makes me happy is that they leave their kids with me. They trust me with the little ones. They don't see me as some kind of monster."
Meanwhile, the news that her father may be studying for a philosophy degree in Castlerea prison elicits a resigned shrug from Sophia. The real question is, she says, is he getting treatment? "I'd be very wary if he doesn't, that he'd come back and try and kill one of us. The fact that he's in Castlerea, back in the west, doesn't make me comfortable."
There is no mystery about the elements that shaped his demons - "I know what it must have been like for my father as a child" - although she sees them as no excuse.
In the criminal trial, he was described as someone who had been rejected by his own father because of his dyslexia. A child who had been beaten for hours while his mother watched (and according to Sophia, was once left for days with a broken leg before being brought to hospital) and who in turn saw his father beating his mother. A child who had suffered a series of sexual abuses since about the age of nine, who had wet himself with fear when he saw a religious brother beating another child at school and later, when hungry and penniless on the streets of Dublin, had been picked up and buggered by an RTE executive. He had been handicapped mentally by parental abuses and lack of love, said clinical psychiatrist, Dr James Behan. He had grown up believing that it was a father's right to abuse his family. It was a tragedy, concluded Dr Behan, that his case had not been diagnosed at an early stage.
Sophia, a woman notably lacking in bitterness, has been asked by many people to forgive him. "I can never do that. I know I can't," she says softly. "I really think he was a depraved, lowlife type of person, because in order to make him feel he was in control of everybody, he had to make us lower than him."
She was the only one to travel to Dublin for his sentencing.
"It was that important to me, to see had he any grace at all. I think he actually shed a few tears . . ." No doubt. He got a total of 256 years. Reduced for leniency and with sentences to run concurrently, he could be out as soon as 2004.
"I was sure it would be something like 20 to 25 years . . . Anyway, he's very distant from me now. I've kind of annihilated him completely from myself. It's all part of recovery."
The response of Joe McColgan's own siblings remains a mystery. Their voices are absent from the book. "There's a lot of my family I don't have any communications with at all, particularly my father's side. I think they just opted out when the exposure of my father came up."
As for her own three siblings, their voices too are absent. "But their pain is great still," she says very slowly, in a voice which is suddenly itself full of pain. The four of them settled their civil suit against the North Western Health Board for a sum "in the region of three-quarters of a million . . . a pittance really". It's a "help", of course, but "it's not millions", she says. "I am able to work, I'm able to deal with work relationships, I'm able to stand up for myself. That's why I say I am quite a complete person. But during the case, there were descriptions of how some of us weren't able to get up to go to work, weren't able to get out of bed in the morning because of psychological depression. They are still in great pain because of what happened and no money is going to give you back all that was lost . . ."
She feels utterly "untarnished". She is fiercely proud of the book, not just for herself and for Susan McKay, but for the impact she expects it to have on those professionals - national school teachers, social workers, health professionals of all kinds - who are in a position to identify and help abused children, who want to see the world through the eyes of an abused child and to learn from the mistakes of the McColgan case. It was certainly not written for the money, she insists; everyone knows books like this don't make money.
Her plan now is to go back to college to study psychology, to become a counsellor herself. "I know what it feels like to be raped, to put it very bluntly." As for her private life, she remains a "proud" Catholic although she doesn't buy a lot of its man-made rules. Now 28, she has a loving partner and a two-year-old son, Gavin, who are clearly the lights of her life. And there, quite reasonably, she draws the line. "Some questions can be very destructive. I have to keep Sophia for myself." Questions? "Well, strangers walk up to me and think they can ask me specific questions, horrible questions like `what's your sex life like?'."
In fact, one of the book's high points for the reader is when at around 19, Sophia begins to realise at college that she likes fellows "big time". "This desire thing, it's so natural in us," she says happily. "I think we have a huge, huge instinct to survive. And I am so grateful that, having a loving and kind grandfather, I knew that not all men were like my father . . ."
That will to overcome catastrophe is something she hugely admires in others. In Sophia's Story, Susan McKay quotes Christopher Reeve, a former "Superman", now paralysed and one of Sophia's heroes. To Reeve in the past, a hero was "someone who commits a courageous act without considering the consequences". But he has revised that "glib version".
A hero, he now believes, is "an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles". It seems to fit with Sophia McColgan. If there was a Sophia motto, it would read, "Pure determined," a favourite, heart-felt expression. Watch her on Kenny Live tonight . . .
She is a remarkable one-off, with an agenda. Heroes are rare and anyway, why should an abused child have to be a hero on top of everything else? It is her and Susan McKay's objective to ensure that other abused children will never have to suffer for justice as Sophia has had to do, or that a health board should abrogate its responsibility to its insurer in the conduct of future cases. That Statute of Limitations is in their sights.
Sophia's Story by Susan McKay is published by Gill and MacMillan, price £6.99