Every morning, Eimear Carroll dressed for a pregnancy that did not exist. 

She wore a fake bump to work - convincing enough to fool colleagues in the corridor, the children in her classroom, even the principal. 

When Carroll wrote to inform the principal that her second baby had been born, the reply came back: ‘Heartiest congratulations on your great news.’ 

She drove to Derrylamogue National School in Rosenallis, Co. Laois, walked through the door, and spent the day inhabiting the role she had created - a pregnant woman, a married woman, a woman whose life, to anyone watching, appeared ordinary.

None of it was real - not the bump, not the husband - the man she called Peter Parsons, complete with a fabricated PPS number that matched no living person. 

Not the baby boy she claimed to have delivered, Oran. Not the girl who followed, Emily, who she told colleagues had arrived early, premature. A difficult, worrying time, she confided.

It was a lie constructed in layers, each detail making it more believable. And for a time, it worked.

When gardaí searched Eimear Carroll’s house in Birr, Co. Offaly, in February 2019, the reality was stark. 

There was one furnished bedroom, no sign of a husband, no trace of children and nothing to suggest the life she had been describing for more than a year had ever existed - just the home of a single woman who had been living a very different story behind closed doors.

Last Friday at Tullamore Circuit Criminal Court, Carroll - now 43 - walked free after pleading guilty to deception, forgery and the use of a false instrument. 

Judge Keenan Johnson imposed a five-year sentence but suspended it in full, having backdated it to February 1 when Carroll had voluntarily remained in custody to face the charges. He described it as ‘quite an extraordinary case’.

That may understate it, because the fraud - staggering as it is - is only one part of the story. 

Before the fake bumps, before the forged certificates, before the invented husband and the imaginary children, there was something much smaller that became a catalyst.

A birthday, a text message, a relationship that barely existed - and a woman who, years later, the courts heard, had decided that the person she blamed for her unhappiness should have her life dismantled, piece by piece.

So who is Eimear Carroll? The uncomfortable answer, established in evidence across two separate court proceedings, that makes this case so difficult to look away from.

Between November 2017 and February 2019, the teacher spun an elaborate fiction -two pregnancies backed up with forged documents from three separate practitioners. 

One certificate, supposedly signed by a consultant obstetrician at the National Maternity Hospital, was later exposed as a fake when the doctor himself confirmed he did not write it.

Armed with the bogus paperwork, Carroll successfully applied for maternity benefits from both the Department of Education and the Department of Social Protection, pocketing €12,425. Meanwhile, the cost of hiring a replacement teacher to cover her supposed leave amounted to €46,939.

In total, just shy of €60,000 in public money was paid out — for pregnancies that never happened, and children who never existed.

The fraud did not unravel in a moment of high drama, but under the cold, methodical scrutiny of the welfare system. 

Garda James Martin, an investigator with the Department of Social Protection, noticed a glaring red flag - there was no follow-up claim for child benefit, what he told the court would normally be ‘a natural progression’.

A check with the General Register Office sealed it. There were no records of any children born to Carroll.

But when confronted, she didn’t crumble - she doubled down. There was ‘obviously some mix-up,’ she insisted. Everything she submitted was ‘above board’. 

She refused to discuss ‘my babies’ and maintained she was entitled to maternity benefit ‘the same as anybody else’.

In court, Judge Keenan Johnson saw it differently. ‘She was clearly unwell. To an extent she was living in a parallel universe,’ he said. Eimear Carroll hadn’t just told the lie - she had disappeared into it.

In sentencing, the judge pointed to her perception that she had needed a means of withdrawal from her work. 

Psychological reports before the court described Carroll as deeply unhappy in her workplace, believing herself bullied by those in authority over her. 

Maternity leave, the court heard, had come to function in her mind as a form of escape. The judge said she had taken, ‘a Draconian action.’

But Carroll has been involved in two legally distinct cases, heard at different courts and arising from different conduct. 

They are presented here separately - but together they form a single, disquieting portrait.

Carroll was nearing 30 when she went on a handful of dates with a man known in court only as A. 

On her birthday, he didn’t call. 

In the early hours of the following morning, Carroll told the court, a text message arrived from A: it wasn’t going to work, he said - his professional commitments, the distance between them. 

It was over almost before it had begun.

Years later, she learned that A was now in a serious relationship with a woman known as B, a care worker. In the context of what followed, the court considered this the point at which the harassment began.

Over two years, Carroll sent around 500 letters - to the couple, their workplaces, their neighbours, and their families. She accused the woman, who worked with vulnerable people, of physically and sexually abusing patients. 

Week after week, envelopes arrived containing graphic images of sexually transmitted infections, sent to people who had no idea who was behind them. 

‘The fear of the unknown was crippling,’ A would later tell the court.

Two HIQA investigations were launched into the facility where the woman worked. Both found the allegations baseless, but the damage had already been done. 

B was summoned to meeting after meeting, she said, because ‘they felt I was a risk to vulnerable families and service users that I was working with’.

The suspicion lingered. The scrutiny remained.

The Court of Appeal described the letters as ‘vituperative’ and the effect on the couple was, in the sentencing judge’s words, ‘absolutely harrowing’. 

They lost friends - people who received the letters and, understandably, resented being pulled into something so ugly, with nowhere to direct that anger except at the two names that kept appearing.

‘No one should be exposed to the level of vulgarity on a typical Tuesday in their own home,’ B told the court. Each envelope widened the circle, carrying the same quiet damage. She stopped telling people about the correspondence.

‘The pictures, the details were so vulgar and degrading, and the messages were so personal and defaming of my character,’ B said. ‘I couldn’t possibly share them with any more people.’

Instead, she absorbed it alone - crying every day, wondering who had received the latest letter and what the next one would say. The fear was no longer confined to the post. It seeped into everything.

Even on their wedding day, it did not lift. The couple warned Gardaí they were worried Carroll might turn up. It was supposed to be a beginning. Instead, B spent the day ‘looking over my shoulder wondering if you were going to do anything to hurt me,’ unable to settle.

Her husband described ringing his wife one evening while on night duty. Her voice was careful, controlled. 

‘I am just turning in,’ she said. ‘I have all the doors locked and I have checked under the bed.’ 

He told the court: ‘This fills me personally with shame that I, in some incredibly small part, have inflicted this on my wife.’

In the end, they did what people do when they run out of ways to endure something. 

They sold their house, moved to a different county, and began again somewhere Carroll did not know - or so they hoped.

Dr Kevin Lambe, a clinical and forensic psychologist, describes the psychology of such cases in general terms.

‘At the root of such scenarios is a pattern of obsessive thinking and rumination over misgivings or what could have been,’ he says. 

‘Initially the person wants to connect with the one they are fixated on, probably through intimacy, so as to restore some vitality to their experience of life. 

'That plea goes unanswered. The obsession evolves.

‘An inner monologue of threat and venom develops. The methods of control become more creative and more frightening. The perpetrator wants the victim to feel threat - to feel the pain of their own wounds.’

Meanwhile, the woman behind it all continued with quiet precision. 

At a post office, buying stamps for the letters, she paused before touching them and slipped on a pair of gloves - a small, deliberate act to avoid leaving fingerprints. 

She understood exactly what she was doing. This was planned.

Eimear Carroll pleaded guilty at Clonmel Circuit Criminal Court in February 2024 to one count of harassment and two counts of sending indecent or grossly offensive material by post, and was sentenced that July to four years imprisonment, two years suspended. 

She appealed. The Court of Appeal dismissed it. The gloves in the post office were real. The 500 letters were real. The photographs were real.

Carroll has a long history of depression, first diagnosed in 2009, alongside anxiety. 

A psychologist who assessed her described her as ‘a psychologically vulnerable individual’. 

After her first court appearance on the harassment charges in 2021, she had suicidal ideation and was admitted to a psychiatric ward. 

She has since been on daily medication for depression and sleep.

By any measure, the disproportion is staggering. A birthday. A text. A relationship that lasted a matter of weeks. 

And from it, years later: 500 letters, two State investigations, a couple forced from their home, a woman who cannot hear a car outside without wondering if it is starting again.

The rejection, the court heard, did not register as the end of a handful of dates. It carried, in the context of everything that followed, the weight of something far more final. 

The psychological evidence before the courts described a woman with a long history of depression - for whom, the evidence suggested, the distance between a small disappointment and a total collapse could shrink to almost nothing.

The courts could not fully explain what made that possible. They could only record what followed.

After the harassment conviction, Carroll remained in custody by choice to face the fraud charges. She entered a guilty plea. Her family repaid the money in full.

In suspending her sentence, Judge Johnson pointed to her remorse, her cooperation, and the consistent picture painted by psychological reports. He described it as a ‘huge fall from grace’ - and meant it with evident compassion.

That compassion matters. The evidence of her illness is not speculative; it is detailed, consistent, and long-standing. A justice system that ignores it would be a poorer one. But compassion is not the same as absolution.

B - who has never been publicly named - sold her house and moved to another county. ‘If a car pulls outside my home,’ she said, ‘I am still questioning is it you. Could this start all over again?’

She does not get a headline or a judge’s careful words, or the quiet dignity of walking out of a courthouse into the summer air. 

What she got were 500 letters - and a life altered in ways that will outlast any sentence handed down.

Does Eimear Carroll deserve compassion? Yes - carefully, deliberately, and with full sight of what she did. 

The woman who walked free from Tullamore last Friday has been seriously unwell for a long time. 

She needed help she did not receive, or could not access, or could not ask for. In its absence, she caused real and lasting harm.

But the fake bump was a choice. The gloves in the post office were a choice. 

The letters, the photographs, the slurs, the referrals - all choices, made repeatedly, methodically, over years. 

Suffering does not entitle one person to turn another into its outlet. The bump was fake. The children were fake. The husband was fake.

But the woman who still checks under the bed is real.