NORA WALL'S friends and colleagues scoff at the courtroom debacle, insisting there is nothing sinister lurking in the character of the woman briefly vilified as Ireland's first female rapist.

One man who spent 14 years with the ex-nun at a Waterford children's home goes further. Louis Doyle says he would happily place his own four children into her care.

Just a few days ago, Nora Wall (formerly Sister Dominic) was branded as a gang rapist by a judge. With her co-accused, 50-year-old schizophrenic Paul ``Pablo'' McCabe, she was sentenced to a lengthy jail term. Now, pending possible re-trial, both defendants are free and legally blameless. It has been a strange passage both for Nora Wall and the courts, and bemused observers are still mystified about the circumstances of a bizarrely rapid transformation.

Nora Wall's friends have never abandoned their passionate defence of her reputation. Louis Doyle, who was in the Coiscéim children's centre in Co Waterford with Nora Wall from 1972 to 1986, speaks of the ``fond memories'' he treasures of both the nun and the home. ``I believe these allegations are wrong,'' he says. ``She is a very high moral person and would not stoop to this.''

Legal experts are baffled by the severity of the sentence given to the former nun. During the trial it was alleged Nora Wall held a 10-year-old girl while Paul McCabe raped her, yet for all the horror of the evidence, little precedent existed for the scale of the sentences. Nora Wall was given a life term, while her co-accused was given a 12-year sentence.

Past cases of serial and serious child sex abuse have attracted sentences between eight and 12 years. UCG law lecturer Tom O'Malley says the life sentence was completely unexpected.

There is continuing uncertainty over the way the State prosecution was conducted. Such is the perplexity of the prosecution's U-turn that Nora Wall's supporters are demanding to know how a well-respected nun came to endure the nightmare of a 10 to two jury decision, albeit after five hours of deliberations, that she assisted in a child's rape.

In just a few weeks, Nora Wall's lifetime of work since she joined the Sisters of Mercy as a 16-year-old girl became the subject of both enthusiastic acclaim and public denigration.

Nora Wall hails from the moderately prosperous countryside which nestles in the foothills of the Comeragh Mountains in Waterford's Nire Valley. It was the type of genteel, religious rural background from which many young women emerged to provide Ireland's nursing, caring and teaching nuns.

Nora's vocation came early and, after consultation with the Order, she decided to devote her life to teaching and childcare. She taught at the local St Anne's secondary school in the mid-Seventies and was made responsible for the Order's group residential homes in 1978, aged 30.

As administrator of the homes, Sister Dominic had charge of 15 to 20 staff and oversaw the welfare of 30 children or more at any one time in Coiscéim (``little footsteps'') and Emoh Ruo (``our home'' spelt backwards), which are special centres in Cappoquin catering for children.

The Sisters of Mercy said they had ``no knowledge or suspicion of sexual abuse'' when, in 1990, they removed Sr Dominic from her post as the home's resident administrator. She was removed ``because of serious management problems at the home'', according to the Order's Sister Coirle McCarthy.

SR Dominic left the town in 1992, using the name Nora Wall. She was given a glowing reference from the South Eastern Health Board, describing her as ``an extremely warm and caring personality'' and ``a professional child careworker, whose abilities are of the highest calibre''.

She used this recommendation to help secure a post supervising a project at a Romanian orphanage, returning to Ireland in 1995 as a volunteer worker in the Regina Coeli women's hostel in Dublin. In 1997 she became manager of the Back Lane men's hostel run by the Society of St Vincent de Paul in Dublin.

Nora Wall and Pablo McCabe's supporters are now seeking reasons for the traumatic confusions of past weeks. What lay behind the decision to quash the convictions in the Court of Criminal Appeal, just four days after Mr Justice Carney passed sentence? What happened to prompt three appeal court judges to order the pair's release?

At the Appeal Court, Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, for the State, said he had been instructed by the DPP to consent to the court allowing an appeal against conviction an appeal which would anyway have been lodged later in the week by lawyers for the two defendants.

He gave three ``principal reasons'' for this unprecedented move, among which was a complaint of rape made in England by Regina Walsh, now aged 21 the victim of the alleged assault at Cappoquin.

Nora Wall's lawyer, Hugh Hartnett SC, had attempted to introduce this information on the day Wall and McCabe were sentenced. He had also pointed out he possessed other information about Patricia Phelan, the key back-up witness who had been called to give evidence by the State. An attempt to have sentence adjourned for a week was, however, rejected.

It was this information that produced a remarkable reversal by the State. What Mr Vaughan Buckley had been ``strenuously opposed'' to and unwilling to contemplate four days before, he accepted with alacrity at Tuesday's appeal hearing. ``The prosecution considers,'' he said, ``that whatever the significance of this information, it could not properly argue that it was not relevant.''

As for Ms Phelan (he did not name her in court), she had been called to give evidence during the six-day trial, despite a prior decision by the DPP that she should not be put in the witness box.

When both accused were found guilty in June, Regina Walsh had not been named. It was after she decided to ``go public'' in newspaper interviews that further complications arose. Ms Walsh, who was photographed with Patricia Phelan, disclosed in a newspaper interview that she had been raped again, this time in London, following her alleged ordeal at the Cappoquin care centre the alleged venue for the offences tried in court.

IN the interview she said: ``I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. This coloured man dragged me down a side street near Leicester Square and raped me. I couldn't believe I could be so unlucky again.''

Mr Hartnett said that as well as learning of the interview after the convictions in June, the defence had discovered through a victim impact report that Regina Walsh had complained of being abused and beaten by a former boyfriend in England.

He also pointed out that after the newspaper article, a man claimed he had been the victim of a false allegation of sexual abuse brought by Ms Phelan in Kilkenny. When the claim reached the High Court, said Mr Hartnett, the judge dealing with it remarked that although the credibility of the witness wasn't an issue, he was less than impressed by the evidence. In addition, Ms Phelan had made separate allegations of sexual assault against her father, brother and uncle.

Mr Hartnett said it seemed extraordinary that gardaí Waterford and Kilkenny would not have known of the similarity in the allegations. Yet defence lawyers were not told all the facts, including a suggestion that Ms Walsh had been in a mental hospital around the time the allegations were made.

At the June trial, Ms Phelan, who was reared in the Cappoquin centre, claimed she twice witnessed Paul McCabe rape Regina Walsh while Sister Dominic, who was in charge, was present. In cross-examination, Ms Phelan who, on the DPP's advice, was not due to give evidence agreed that in her first statement to gardaí she had not mentioned the incidents she later testified about. She said this was because she wasn't asked, and it didn't occur to her to tell gardaí until they visited her a year later to ask about an incident involving McCabe and a child.

Ms Phelan pointed out that Regina Walsh told her she did not remember her coming into the room. ``I actually snuck into the room and left the door slightly open, while I watched for a few moments.'' She says she then asked, ``What the f**k is going on?'' but was told it had nothing to do with her.

Today Nora Wall is back in her family home, where her brother Jim says he ``never believed for a moment that Nora was guilty''. But when his sister was found guilty he was ``numb for half an hour''.

The see-saw case has still to reach its conclusion. On Tuesday, Wall and McCabe were released on bail. A decision on whether they must face a new trial will be made in November.