15 YEARS BEHIND BARS FOR CO DONEGAL CHILD RAPIST

March 3, 2014

gavel1AN evil child rapist from County Donegal has been jailed today for 15 years for sickening attacks on his own relatives.

The man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of his victims, was found guilty of a dozens of charges at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin last month.

Today the 48-year-old from Inishowen was jailed for 15 years.

He was found guilty after trial of 65 counts of rape and sexual assaults. He was found guilty on fifteen counts of sexually assaulting a girl from when she was nine to fifteen.

He was found guilty on forty counts of sexually assaulting and raping another young girl when she was nine until she was nineteen. The rapes commenced when she was only ten.

The paedophile was also placed on the sex offenders register for life.

Mr Justice McCarthy quoted from the woman’s victim impact where she described having “lost her childhood” when the abuse began.

“The heartbreak is obvious,” he said, noting that the victim still suffers from overwhelming feelings of guilt, nightmares and panic attacks.

In the report, the woman said she spent her childhood “at the hands of a monster”.

The woman, now aged 24, said she was sexually assaulted at the age of nine and raped repeatedly from the age of 10, sometimes on a near-daily basis.

She said as a child she felt lonely because she had to carry the biggest secret of her life and couldn’t tell anyone.

She once planned her own suicide because she felt she couldn’t go on feeling dirty, horrible and unworthy of love.

“I can never get away from it, even when I sleep. Every day I fight to get out of bed, to find some chink of light to make life worth living. You destroyed me. You broke my trust in all men,” the statement read.

She said the man was supposed to be her guardian and her protector but that instead he was her “abuser and tormentor”, who treated her like a “rag doll” or like an “object to play with” for his own sexual gratification.

“I lived with the physical pain every time you raped me, but I live with the emotional pain all my life,” she said.

She apologised to the second victim, who was also sexually assaulted by the man.

“I feel it’s my fault he abused you. If only I’d spoken out earlier – I’ll never forgive myself for letting it happen to you,” she said.

The second victim, now in her late teens, submitted a victim impact report which was not read out in full to the court.

In the statement, the girl said she “lost her childhood” as a result of being sexually assaulted. She said she still has nightmares and difficulty sleeping.

She is fearful of being left alone in the house and feels guilty for breaking the family apart, although Mr Justice McCarthy said she has “no need” to feel guilty.

Garda Paul Forrestal told Paul Greene SC, prosecuting, that the first victim was aged around nine when the man, who lived nearby, began sexually assaulting her.

It started when she was watching TV lying on the couch, and he would place his hand inside her clothes.

The assaults also took place in a spare bedroom and in the man’s bedroom.

From the age of 10, the man would push or pull the girl towards a bedroom, force her to lie face down on the bed and rape her.

The court heard that he used every possible occasion he could to rape the child, and that the rapes were “very, very frequent” when she lived with the man for a time.

The second victim told gardaí that the man also started sexually assaulting her at around the age of nine. The court heard the assaults followed the same pattern of abuse as with the other victim but they did not escalate to rape.

One specific allegation was made that in the summer of 2007, the man came home after a stag party and sexually assaulted the second victim, then aged 12.

 

 


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