A Dublin woman who is the only Irish person to have stood trial for assisted suicide says in a TV documentary she was certain she was going to be jailed.

Gail O'Rorke was found not guilty three years ago of assisting her close friend, Bernadette Forde, 51, to take her own life in 2011.

But in an emotional new interview, O’Rorke recalled how she forced herself to watch videos of Mountjoy jail ahead of her trial "to prepare for the worst.”

"The night before the judgment it was impossible to sleep.  I had this thought of, do the birds sound the same in prison?” she said.

"I really thought I was going to prison, because this was the first case of its kind."

In the new documentary, Finne, which will be screened this week on Irish language station TG4, the 46-year-old also said she has no regrets over her past actions, insisting she didn't do anything wrong.

O'Rorke first got to know Forde when she became her cleaner, after which the pair quickly formed a strong friendship. The bond became even closer after her employer's illness worsened.

Forde had multiple sclerosis, a condition which started to deteriorate at an alarming rate after she became wheelchair-bound after a car accident in 2008.

As the condition worsened she made plans to travel to Zurich to the Swiss euthanasia clinic Dignitas, but never made it after gardai intervened.

But she did take her own life in 2011 after taking a lethal dose of barbiturates.  O'Rorke was charged on three counts of assisting in her friend's suicide.

Although she was acquitted in 2015, she told program-makers she had expected the court to make an example of her by jailing her.

And during the two-year period between O'Rorke being charged and the start of her trial in April 2015, she said she started to prepare herself mentally for life behind bars.

Her husband Barry, who also contributes to the documentary, said, "In case she went to prison, we looked at videos of Mountjoy Prison."

O'Rorke, who went on to write a book, called Crime or Compassion? detailing her relationship with Forde and her friend's death added, "Over time the MS started to affect Bernadette's bodily functions. The guilt I would feel is that if Bernadette was now confined to a nursing home or a care home where she was going through the indignities that she wanted to avoid so much."

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Here O'Rorke speaks to RTE's "The Late Late Show" about her experience: