A woman who had been on trial accused of the murder of her partner's four-year-old son has changed her plea to guilty.
At the opening of the trial last week, the court was told the woman admitted the manslaughter of the boy in 2021, but denied murdering him.
She cannot be named because of the law protecting the anonymity of child witnesses in criminal proceedings.
On the fourth day of the trial, the woman was re-arraigned in front of the jury and pleaded guilty to murder.
She will be sentenced on 1 December after victim impact statements are heard.
The child, who in 2021 was living with his father and the accused woman, was taken to hospital after his father called an ambulance and said his son had fallen from a bunk bed.
Paramedics found him lying in the foetal position and unconscious in his bedroom.
They noticed he had a lot of bruises of different colours on his body, suggesting they had been caused at different times. Bleeds were later found in two parts of his brain.
A paediatric consultant doctor told the trial how medical staff gasped when they saw the extent of the injuries on the child's face and body.
Dr Stephen O'Riordan told the Central Criminal Court that he went to review the boy after he had surgery for a severe brain injury.
He documented all the bruises on his body and said none of them looked like a normal bruise.
The court also heard injuries to the boy's brain and liver were like those caused by a car accident.
Dr O'Riordain said when he and his team took the drapes away in the operating theatre, they saw all the injuries and "the whole theatre gasped".
He documented all the bruises and said there was not a single one that looked like a normal bruise and any of them could be consistent with non-accidental injuries.
In all he documented 17 areas of bruising as well as other injuries.
Dr O'Riordan said bruising on the child's left elbow and right shoulder were consistent with grab marks left by finger tips.
The child had two black eyes, which the court heard his father claimed had been caused by falling twice in the previous few weeks.
The doctor said it was unlikely a four-year-old would get two black eyes from a fall and these injuries were more likely to come from a head injury.
He described the black eyes, along with bruising around the child's ears as "classical signs of physical abuse".
The doctor also said a fracture to one of the boy's ribs had begun to heal, meaning the injury had happened a week to ten days beforehand. He said the child's bruising would definitely have been noticed by anyone who met him.
The accused woman told gardaí the child was "bold and cheeky".
She said he used to be "put on the bold step" but for the previous month he had been grounded and sent to his room a lot.
When he was grounded he was not allowed downstairs and would have to sit on the floor of his room.
He had not been allowed to come down for a number of family birthdays.
State Pathologist Dr Heidi Okkers, who carried out a post-mortem examination on the boy, said that the injuries to his brain were consistent with someone shaking the child as well as forcefully striking his head against a hard object like a wall or a floor.
Dr Okkers told the court that these kind of injuries were not caused by falling from a bed, as the child's father initially claimed.
She said tears to the child's liver would have been caused by direct trauma, such as a punch or a kick or a knee to the abdomen.
She said either the head or liver injury could have caused the boy's death.
