Donegal man gets 15 years for sexual abuse

A Donegal man convicted of 65 counts of raping and sexually assaulting two close family members, sometimes on a daily basis, for over a decade has been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The man was found guilty of 45 counts of rape and 20 counts of sexual assault on the two girls between September 16th, 1998 and August 31st, 2010. The 48-year-old had denied all charges. A jury at the Central Criminal Court took just under two hours to find the man guilty on all counts.

Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the man had taken “every single opportunity” to subject both victims to repeated and constant sexual abuse over many, many years. He said sentencing was not “an exercise in vengeance” but that the offences were of great seriousness and represented a major breach of trust.

He said the man had been in loco parentis to the first victim when she lived in his house for a while and when she spent a lot of time there babysitting. Mr Justice McCarthy quoted from the woman’s victim impact statement in which 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 had 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 could not 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,” the statement read.