An accountant's office manager who embezzled £17,000 intended for the Revenue Commissioners because she was besotted by a man has received a three-year suspended sentence.
Sharon Fagan (24), St Michan's Flats, Dublin 7, wrote her own name on the cheques and paid them into her personal account rather than to the Revenue Commissioners' account.
Judge Frank O'Donnell at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court warned her she would have to serve the sentence if she failed to repay approximately €11,000 in monthly instalments of €500 in 24 months.
The €11,000 is what remains of the money she undertook to repay her employers. She had pleaded guilty to seven sample charges that she deposited into her account cheques drawn on the account of a client of the accountancy firm.
She had previously defaulted on some of the payments and Judge O'Donnell warned her that a further default or delay in payments would mean jail.
Judge O'Donnell also imposed a concurrent three-year suspended sentence for the charge of fraud. The court had heard that Fagan embezzled the money to pay a deposit on a house because of a commitment to her former boyfriend.
Mr George Birmingham SC, defending, had previously told the court that her now much lower income was the reason for Fagan missing two payments and only partly paying another.
He said she was now working in a fast-food shop earning the minimum wage rather than her previous managerial salary.
Mr Birmingham said Fagan's father blamed her former boyfriend for what happened.
She had become sucked in to the crime to try to save the relationship, but that had now soured.