Racial bias and the failure of Ireland’s first FGM trial
RTÉ, the Irish public media service, released First Conviction, a documentary and podcast that trace how an ordinary Irish family became the centre of Ireland’s first female genital mutilation (FGM) conviction and how they later fought to clear their name.
September 2016 was where this story began. A young married couple were at home in Dublin on a Friday morning with their two young children. Originally from two countries in east Africa, the couple had been living in Ireland for almost a decade. Having changed her nappy, their twenty one month old daughter turned, ran and fell. Her cries startled her parents who went to comfort her. As they picked her up, they noticed she was bleeding. Panicked, they took her to hospital, where everything began to spiral out of control.
It was only after four days in hospital that Sayeed and Halawa began to understand they were in real difficulty. No one appeared to believe them. Within a week of arriving at the hospital with their injured daughter, they were sitting in a police station answering questions about what had happened.
Their children were then kept under supervision and monitored by authorities for three years, and during that time Sayeed and Halawa had to sign on bail twice weekly. Eventually they faced trial, the first of its kind in Ireland.
Sayeed and Halawa faced two charges in court, an act of female genital mutilation against their daughter and child cruelty. If found guilty, they faced up to fourteen years in prison. Despite all medical witnesses agreeing FGM had taken place, Sayeed remained confident the truth would come out when he took the stand to give evidence. They were found guilty. During the original sentencing in January 2020, Judge Elma Sheahan sentenced Sayeed to five and a half years imprisonment and Halawa to four years and nine months. Having been sentenced to prison, they were taken to separate jails in Ireland to serve out their terms.
Deprived of their freedom and with their children placed in the care of relatives, life in prison was hard beyond belief. But they could not give up hope, and from inside their prison cells, they began to fight back to seek justice. In 2024 the DPP entered a nolle prosequi in respect of all charges, meaning the State was no longer proceeding with the prosecution, although the couple had not been acquitted. Now they are seeking a certificate of a miscarriage of justice to clear their names, a decision that could potentially lead to one of the largest compensation payments in the history of the State. The hearing, scheduled for January 2026, will take place before a panel of three judges in the Court of Appeal in Court sixteen in the Criminal Courts of Justice.
Cultural bias and flawed translation:
Sayeed and Halawa were accused of FGM because the injury their daughter presented with in hospital was interpreted by some medical staff as consistent with female genital mutilation rather than an accidental fall. The father’s first explanation to the police was that his daughter had fallen backwards onto a toy. From the very beginning, however, their situation was shaped by two factors that worked against them: deep translation problems and the way the system viewed them as African parents.
From the first interview in Crumlin Garda station, there were serious interpretation failures. The interpreter assigned to Sayeed did not know how to translate the words for female genital mutilation. This meant that essential questions and answers were not clearly understood, leaving gaps, confusion and inconsistencies on the official record. Instead of being resolved, these translation problems continued through later interviews, assessments and statements, creating a pattern of unclear communication that affected how the authorities interpreted the couple’s explanations.
At the same time, experts later pointed out the broader context. This was the first FGM prosecution in Ireland, and Sayeed and Halawa were a Black African family in a system with limited experience in cross cultural medical, linguistic and child protection cases. Their background and the nature of the injury placed them under immediate suspicion. Assumptions about African communities and FGM, combined with the lack of accurate interpretation, misleadingly shaped how the family’s reality was replaced with a narrative rooted in prejudice. What might have been treated as a tragic accident for another family quickly escalated into a criminal investigation.
These two factors, cultural bias and flawed translation, put this frightened family at the centre of Ireland’s first FGM prosecution.
