'I can take you to a place in Nigeria, where when a child dies from female genital mutilation, they burn the body. They do not bury it, because they say the child was born evil and that was why she died."

These words ring in my ears as I drive back to Dublin, exhausted after 24 hours of the most intense experience I've endured for a long time. The night before, I'd driven for four hours in order to meet Charity and Sola, two Nigerian women who had both suffered from the effects of FGM, and Sola's daughter, Miriam, who is now six. Miriam was cut in Lagos four years ago.

"I was out of the house, when I came home, my daughter was crying, holding her private parts," Sola tells me. "I realised her nappy was soaked in blood and I took it off and saw what had happened. She was still bleeding.

"My husband's family had done this. I had been against it even though I had been circumcised myself as a child, but it was the tradition of his people. I was so angry I went to the police in Lagos and they told me to go away as it was family business. My daughter still suffers. Some times there is still terrible infection and pus comes out of the wound. It is still raw all these years later. You can ask my GP if you don't believe me."

Charity, now 22, was 11 years old when they took her and her twin sister Chike, laid them down side by side and cut their outer genitals away. Chike bled to death as she lay beside her sister. It took two hours for Chike to die. I see the grief and pain in Charity's eyes as she tells me this. Charity is Ebu, from the Edu state in Nigeria. She says that her mother also went to the police when this happened and that they "chased her away".

Both these women, like so many others, had suffered in silence up until now because they accepted the inevitability of what had happened.

"It's tradition." "That's just what they do." But they have come out to tell their stories now because they were so incensed by the comments of the Nigerian Ambassador, Kemafo Nonyerem Chikwe, on last week's Would You Believe programme on RTE One about Pamela Izevbekhai.

The ambassador insisted that there was no FGM in Nigeria.

"I would like to ask the Irish Government to investigate this thing properly," said Charity. "Go to the people on the street and ask them. We are scared. If Pamela and her children are sent back to Nigeria, they are in danger, apart from the FGM factor, they will be punished by the Nigerian government," Charity claims.

When I arrive at the first location, a refugee hostel, to speak to Charity and Sola, I am greeted by Joy. Joy, 23, vibrant and beautiful takes me to her room where she gets on her mobile phone to tell the others that I am here.

"There are so many women who want to talk to you," she tells me. "They are all angry at what the ambassador said."

I ask her if she is Nigerian. She nods yes. "Were you circumcised?" I ask her outright. She shakes her head. "No," she says, "I was lucky." She looks at her sleeping son in the bed beside where she sits, "And he's a boy," she adds.

We go to the television room where I find myself sitting in a room surrounded by a group of angry Nigerian women, 19 of them.

Ambassador Chikwe had sparked a fire here.

At first they are all wary of me, and I speak to them of my affiliation with Pamela to reassure them I am not out to trick them. Then gradually they begin one by one to voice their anger.

"How can she say such things?" one woman asks. "A lot of people have so much to say but are scared. Where I

come from, in the Delta State, we are so poor you don't even get one square meal a day. We live in such poverty, uneducated, two, three whole families in one room. You can't expect someone who is wealthy and divorced from the reality of the real Nigerian people to understand or speak for the Nigerian people."

The women tell me they have organised a demonstration outside the Nigerian Embassy for the next day and the organiser, Uche, is the woman who arranged for me to come and speak to Charity and Sola. A girl called Kemi puts up her hand and tells me she's got a lift to Dublin at 6am the following morning. She's going to demonstrate. Some of the others who won't give their names to me say they are too scared to go. Others such as Faith and Shakira give their names. Joy tells me they tried to organise a bus, but it cost too much so she won't be going.

We chat some more about the Would You Believe programme and Pamela's case. The women tell me that whatever the Irish people want to believe about Pamela's own story, she has highlighted something that is very, very real back in Nigeria and they are behind her in that. I want to see at this point if any others have direct experience of FGM, so I decide to broach it directly. "Have any of you all here experienced FGM, directly or indirectly?" I ask.

There is a sudden silence. I scan the room for reaction. Some eyes look scared. Some eyes look angry. Most eyes are cast down. There is a long silence and I think, "Oops, I shouldn't have gone there". Then, suddenly, Kemi puts up her hand and simply and clearly says: "Me, I had it."

There's more silence. A few eyes now look up. Kemi goes on. "I don't care, I'll say it, it happened, it's real," she says.

Then like in a movie, where all it takes is one, more hands start to go up and eyes become level. The women nod at each other in reassurance and voices begin to whisper "me", "me", "I had it", "me too".

I look round the room as a wave of nods and voices takes me by surprise. I had expected maybe one woman other then Sola and Charity to have undergone it. I knew FGM was real but I hadn't expected every woman in the room bar one (Joy) to have had it done. Eighteen women out of the 19 there had suffered female genital mutilation.

The women now become animated. I can see that for so long they have remained silent and now through sheer anger, they have found their voices and these voices are enraged. I turn my tape-recorder on and put it in the middle of the carpet. The next hour is the most intense and emotional of times. The anger disappears and the tears begin to flow. They are unstoppable.

"Where I come from, they do it just before you get married . . . you have to do it. The men, they come and take you, they will lock you in a room for days, they bring you food, the men, they hold you down, hold your legs, your arms . . ."

"We have to do it . . There is one village, I could take you there and you could film it. It happens day and night, that's why the people go to this village, to be cut . . ."

"My husband's younger sister nearly died from it in Lagos . . ."

"We do it where I come from in Osun state . . ."

"They held me down, I wanted them to stop, the pain was unbearable, but they said it was tradition . . ."

"I had it when I was a baby, I can't remember it, but you can see it's gone . . ."

"Where I come from they do it while you are pregnant with your first child, then after there will be a celebration; it happened to my daughter too . . ."

"When they did it to me, I was so badly injured that I did it to my daughter at a month old so she would not suffer as an adult, like me . . ."

"My friend had a daughter and she kept pushing her clitoris down and patting it with water to make it go down so they wouldn't cut her . . ."

"Giving birth is a big problem after FGM . . ."

"There is a place called Carbare where they do it to everyone; a lot of them die, you are in the hands of God . . ."

"Now that I am pregnant, if I have a baby girl, I don't want to go back or they will come for her . . ."

"I am from Wani Waterside. We do it in the Delta. I will bring my boys up to not expect their wives to be cut . . ."

"Mostly they will just take the child, the mother may not be there and she just has to accept the consequences . . ."

"If my husband's family want to cut my child and I try to go to the police, are you crazy? What will they do? . . ."

"I will call up my mother on speaker phone, and she will tell you what happens . . ."

"If God is on your side, you will live through it . . ."

"The ambassador should go to my village, I will give her the name of my village, she should go there . . ."

"The ambassador said if that happens in Nigeria, people should go to the police. But it is a family tradition and it stays within the family. The whole Nigerian community in Ireland is enraged . . ."

The outpouring of rage continues. Then the door opens and a well-dressed man and woman come in. He asks, "Are you the journalist?"

"Yes," I tell him. He says: "My name is Ademola. I knew Pamela when were in school, when we were young in Nigeria." He is furious with the ambassador. The woman with him is called Toyin and she nods in agreement.

After two hours of this group outpouring, many of the women want to talk to me alone and tell me their individual stories. I end up going with my tape recorder to their rooms one by one and the stories are all grim. I am moved by what they tell me and touched that they trust me to reveal such intimate and humiliating details of their own and their children's ordeals.

I am also emotionally and physically exhausted at the end. I thank them all and reassure the women who wished to remain anonymous that they would be safe after their revelations. I drive to my hotel and collapse, drained and in a slight state of shock, into bed.

The next day I am picked up by Joe, a fellow journalist, who drives me to meet more women at a different hostel. Three of them come out to meet us and we go to a nearby pub where the women give me their stories. They are embarrassed to be in a pub at 11.30am, though the modern, bright pub was empty and being set up for lunch. For them, it was still a shameful place. These three women are very young and very articulate and all are wary of seeing their names in print.

"If Pamela goes back she is real danger . . . if you believe that she might not have been a real refugee before, I don't know, but she certainly is now," says one of the women.

"If Pamela goes back, she is at great risk, if it's the same Nigeria that I came from. I'm sure that if she goes home, she will be detained with her children," says another.

Another of the three agrees to give her name. Theresa says, "They have actually made Pamela more than a refugee, her whole family is at risk and I don't mind my name being said now. As for what Pamela said about the burial, that is true, it is a taboo in Nigeria for the parents, the mother and the father of a dead child, to go to the funeral or know where the child is buried. This is so back home."

In this, Theresa is repeating what a number of the woman had said the previous night.

During the long drive back to Dublin, I try to analyse and make sense of what I had been privy to during the previous 24 hours. I had known that female genital mutilation had once been rampant in Nigeria, but believed it now to be at the level that the Nigerian government itself had given -- 32.6 per cent.

All of the women and children I spoke to were ready to show the proof of their mutilations. None of these women was using FGM as a reason to seek asylum in Ireland, so they would not be trying to further their own causes by coming forward. In fact, it was the opposite. The women who withheld their identity did so in part because they thought revealing such things might damage their own cases as it might anger the Irish Government to have to face up to this barbarism.

There was a lot of criticism by the women of Minister for Integration, Conor Lenihan. I found myself defending the minister's motives which was bizarre as I had been incensed by his comments on radio the week before.

Then I think about Pamela and ask myself what my visit to these women had taught me about her. I realise that whatever about false certificates or letters, Pamela has been telling the truth about female genital mutilation. Telling the truth about her in-laws' power and insistence. Telling the truth about the police not being in a position to help her. Telling the truth about the abduction attempts. Telling the truth about not knowing where the grave is (Other family members do know where it is and can bring you there). Telling the truth about her very real anguish and fear of being sent back to Nigeria. Telling the truth when she said that her family was in danger back home, as she brings this more and more to light here in Ireland.

What else does the Government -- which has decided that some of those who had been detained in Guantanamo after 9/11 are now, on their release, to be made welcome here -- need to know to end the plight of Pamela and her daughters?