‘Monster’ jailed for seven years for abuse of former partner’s daughters

A “monster” who sexually abused his former partner’s two young girls for three years in Westmeath in “a most extraordinary breach of trust” has been jailed for seven years.

In a statement by the older of the girls, the 59-year-old defendant, who cannot be named to protect the identity of his victims, was compared to “the monster under the bed” that most children fear.

“My monster was very real. He was the shadow that appeared in the doorway at night,” she said, telling the judge that she has suffered “the overwhelming feeling of trying to float above the level of grief for the little girl I was”.

She says that now, as a young adult, she feels “worthless and dirty”, with “no understanding of boundaries”, and that certain scents, textures, and even music trigger painful memories for her now.

The man “branded” her with “an untouchable, painful scar” she can never remove, and she became upset as she recalled how she believed that “if this happened to me, he’d leave my little sister alone”.

Agoraphobia

He didn’t and, in her own victim impact statement, the younger sister said she still suffers from severe anxiety and agoraphobia, as well as chronic depression. It was a challenge to even go to the shop without having a panic attack, she said.

“It’s like mould,” she said of the trauma she has suffered. “It develops over time. You clean it and scrub it and paint over it. But it always has its way of coming back - even when you think you’re not thinking about it, it’s there”.

She said she came forward for the little girl who was hurt by the man’s actions, before turning to her abuser and addressing him directly.

“As I look at you now, you are a parasite. And it says a lot about you that not one person showed up for you here today.”

In May, a jury found the man guilty of seven counts of sexually assaulting the girls. He was remanded in custody to reappear at Mullingar Circuit Court before Judge Kenneth Connolly.

Detective Garda David Mead gave Cathal Ó Braonáin BL evidence of the abuse, which took place between 2006 and 2010, when the victims were aged between nine and 12 years, and five and eight years respectively, in a number of addresses across Westmeath.

The court heard how the man had “normalised” certain behaviour with the girls, such as making them show him their “ninnies”, and chasing them around the house, only to “smack their bums playfully” and check the colour of their underwear for himself.

Escalated

However, the behaviour soon escalated and the man began visiting the bedroom of the older girl, getting into bed behind her and grinding his erect penis against her. He would often make her pull down her pyjama bottoms and underwear, touching her as he did this.

He left bruises on her hips on one occasion where she said “something was different” and “he was angry”. He was more aggressive with her and threatened to burn her mother to death if the girl told anyone.

He said that he slept beside her mother so it would be easy to do it. He also told the girl he knew people in the IRA and they’d “get her” if she said anything.

The girl recalled a further escalation in the abuse when she was 11 or 12 years old and the man began bending her over and grinding against her, eventually penetrating her with his fingers, making her cry with pain.

During one incident, she asked if he did this to his own daughter, and he told her that he didn’t, and that she was “special” to him.

She told Gardaí she felt guilty but she thought that if she let him do it to her, he wouldn’t do it to her sister. However, her sister, in later years, disclosed to her that he had abused her too.

Her earliest memories of the abuse were at the age of five when he’d ask her to show him her underwear and he’d call her “pink knickers”. The behaviour, again, escalated to the man waking her up and tugging her arm towards his penis, forcing her to touch it even when she tried to pull her arm away.

He also began to touch the girl, with one incident taking place when she was seven or eight years old and he had asked her for a hug. She was reluctant, but he guilt-tripped her into it, only for him to put his hand down her trousers and penetrate her with his fingers. She started screaming and ran to the bathroom “sore and confused”.

The accused denied all allegations when he was arrested and interviewed in 2022. He was in his early to mid 40s at the time, the court heard, and is 59 years old now. He has no previous convictions.

In mitigation, Andrea Callan BL, told the court that her client, a father-of-four, had never come to the attention of An Garda Síochána other than for these charges. He maintained his innocence throughout the court proceedings and has not accepted the jury verdict.

He has “complex health needs and requirements” received a testicular cancer diagnosis at a young age, she said, and “appeared to recover from that”. In 2010 he had a “debilitating stroke”, and he would be in a “very difficult situation if he finds himself in prison”.

Breach of trust

Judge Connolly said that this was a case of a “most extraordinary breach of trust” in that the accused was in an intimate relationship with the girls’ mother, who “trusted him into her life and the lives of her daughters”, essentially putting him in a position of “loco parentis”.

“He undoubtedly and severely exploited that trust simply for his own sexual gratification, marring those two lovely young lives,” he said.

He noted that the nature of the sexual assault included exposure to himself self-pleasuring, as well as vaginal touching, digital penetration and grinding, all of which was “significant offending”.

The older sister, he noted, decided “not to burst the bubble of family harmony” and “was afraid to tell her mother because it would be very hurtful to her”.

“She believed that the consequences would be her fault and not the accused’s,” he said. “She also very clearly thought if she said nothing and allowed it, she would protect her little sister.”

He noted the “element of grooming” involved, and the “normalising” of this type of contact, stressing that it was “utterly sinister and worrying that he was abusing these girls while he had daughters of his own of the same age, but no empathy” for what he was doing.

The accused became more confident in his abuse the longer the girls stayed quiet about it, and “it is very very telling” that to this day the older of the two sisters is still becoming “nauseated and anxious” by certain smells and music.

He noted the accused’s medical difficulties and that he has a good work history and was a good provider for his ex-wife and four children. A probation report assessed him at a “low risk” of general reoffending, and at “moderate risk” of sexual reoffending.

Turning to sentence, he mitigated an eight-year prison sentence down to six years and six months for the abuse of the older sister.

For the abuse of the younger sister, he set a headline sentence of six years but, noting the fact that there was “a wilful intention to move on to a second victim”, he only mitigated this sentence down to five years.

Because there were two distinct victims and two separate lives “significantly marred” by the abuse, Judge Connolly decided to make those sentences concurrent, bringing them to a total of 11 years and six months in total.

However, considering the proportionality and the totality of the sentences, he reduced the total down to nine years, suspending the final two years for a period of five years post-release. The remaining seven years were backdated to May 20, when he first went into custody