An 84-year-old man has been jailed for five years after he was found guilty by a jury of sexual assault. His victim was just six years old when he began abusing her while minding her in her family home.
The man, who can’t be named to protect the anonymity of his victim, had been found guilty following a six-day trial of 16 counts of sexually assaulting the girl between June 2015 and June 2019 at her family home in Co Cork.
On Thursday at Cork Circuit Criminal Court, Judge Helen Boyle noted that the girl, now in her mid-teens, had said in a victim impact statement that her life had been changed irrevocably by the abuse she had suffered at the hands of the accused, who was in a relationship with her mother.
The girl said since the abuse “her life has changed in ways she never expected or deserved, the person she was before the assault is not the same person she is today and she now constantly lives with a fear and anxiety that she did not experience before”.
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The judge also noted that while the girl said “she will carry the scar of the accused’s actions in her mind for the rest of her life, she will not allow them define who she is and that she hopes to move on with her life and is not a victim but a survivor”.
She noted the abuse, which involved the man touching the girl’s private parts inside her clothing but outside her underwear, happened two or three times a week on a weekly basis between 2015 and 2019 when the girl was between six and nine years of age.
The accused had told the girl not to tell anyone about the abuse, and bought her treats, but she told her mother following a family holiday in 2019 and later told their family doctor – which in turn led to Tusla being notified and a Garda investigation.
The judge noted that the accused had no previous convictions and had not come to Garda attention since the abuse, but there was no understating the gravity of the offending, particularly given the young age of his victim.
She said she shared the DPP’s view that the abuse was at the upper end of the scale in terms of seriousness and merited a sentence of between nine to 14 years because of the girl’s age, the breach of trust given he was in loco parentis, and the prolonged nature of the abuse.
Defence barrister Elaine Audley, in her plea for leniency, had pointed out her client had multiple health problems including serious cardiac issues, kidney problems, diabetes and COPD, and the judge fully accepted that the accused was not in good health.
The judge said she believed the offending merited a headline sentence of nine years but, taking into account the man’s poor health, she would reduce the sentence to one of seven years and suspend the final two years to incentivise his rehabilitation.
Boyle made it a condition of the suspension that the accused remain under the supervision of the Probation and Welfare Service and would complete a programme for sex offenders upon his release from custody after serving the five-year term.
She also backdated the sentence to November 26th, 2025, when the accused was first taken into custody following his conviction by the jury.
