A SLIGO man who subjected his two daughters to “a catalogue of horrors” has been jailed for 14 years at the Central Criminal Court.
The man raped and sexually abused the girls over a 16-year period in the 1980s and 1990s.
One daughter told gardaí she first recalled her father abusing her when she was aged between five and 10. She said it must have happened like this before even though this was her earliest memory, because she had not felt the situation was unusual at the time.
The woman’s younger sister told gardaí that when she tried to tell her mother about the abuse sometime before her teens, her father pulled out a handful of her pubic hair as a warning.
The man (65) who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded guilty on his trial date to 16 sample counts of indecent assault, unlawful sexual intercourse, rape and buggery of two daughters between 1980 and 1996 at a Sligo location.
He pleaded guilty to four counts of indecent assault and two counts each of unlawful sexual intercourse and buggery of one daughter between August 1980 and August 1986. He pleaded guilty to four counts of indecent assault and two counts each of oral and anal rape of the second daughter on dates between September 1984 and June 1996.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the victims had undergone “a catalogue of horrors” over the years and noted the Director of Public Prosecutions believed the abuse to be at the upper end of the scale. He also observed the man had only entered a guilty plea when he saw his daughters in court ready to give evidence against him.
However the judge said the courts “must be guided by the light of reason” and took into account the man’s age and health difficulties. He sentenced him to eight years for one victim and six for the other, to run consecutively, meaning a total of 14 years. He had previously declared the man a sex offender.
At earlier court proceedings, Det Garda Colleen O’Neill said the man gave his older daughter a drink of what she now suspected was alcohol from a silver flask before he first raped her when she was between 10 and 11 years old.
Thomas O’Malley, defending, said a doctor’s report indicated his client had had psychological and alcohol-related problems.