A man has been convicted by a jury at the Central Criminal Court of raping a woman while she slept. Adam Keane (26), Barnageeha, Daragh, Co Clare, was found guilty on day five of his trial.
The jury reached its decision following more than five hours of deliberation.
Mr Justice Paul Carney remanded Keane on continuing bail for sentence later and directed that he be registered as a sex offender.
Keane had denied raping the 33-year-old woman in a house in a Co Clare town on May 30th, 2005.
The complainant had told Pauline Walley SC, prosecuting, that she went to sleep that night with the bedside lamp and bathroom light on because she was afraid of the dark. She also left her bedroom door wide open.
When she woke up the room was dark and a man was on top of her having sex. She kissed him back because she thought it was her partner but when light from a street lamp came into the room she noticed that he had tattoos on his arms.
Her partner did not have tattoos and then she felt the man's hair and noticed that it was softer than her partner's and it had some kind of gel in it that he did not use. She said she then pushed him off her and found that her underwear had been removed. She went to the bedroom door but it was closed and she banged her head.
She opened it and switched on the bathroom light and turned to see Keane, whom she had known for a few months, sitting on her bed. The woman said she asked him what he was doing. He said nothing but she described him as having a "couldn't-care-less attitude".
He did not appear to be drunk or "on anything".
She turned on her bedside light, picked up tracksuit bottoms off the floor, got her phone and left the house.
Keane told gardaí that he could not recall anything about that night from the time he left a pub until being woken up by gardaí in his girlfriend's home.
When asked by gardaí if it was possible he raped the woman, he replied: "I am not going to say it's impossible because I blanked out, so it is possible."
He told gardaí he had regular blackouts after a night of heavy drinking and said he was in "a state" when he left the pub that night. He added that he did not think he could possibly have raped the woman because he said he was not "capable of that kind of thing".
Keane volunteered blood samples for DNA analysis and told gardaí that if it came back that his semen was found on the victim he would say it must not have been rape because he had never raised a hand to a woman in his life.