A priest who provided a character statement during a sexual assault trial in Co Kerry has described the seven year sentence handed down as “extremely harsh”.
Speaking on Newstalk's Breakfast Show this morning Castlegregory parish priest Fr Seán Sheehy said he had no regrets in supplying the character reference to Dan Foley (35) who was jailed yesterday for five years for sexually assaulting a woman in Listowel.
Foley, a nightclub bouncer, Meen, Listowel, was sentenced to seven years with the final two suspended by Judge Donagh McDonagh in the Circuit Criminal Court in Tralee.
Before sentencing dozens of people queued inside the courthouse to shake hands and sympathise with Foley.
He had been found guilty two weeks ago of sexually assaulting a woman who was discovered by a Garda patrol in a semi-conscious state and naked from the waist down alongside a skip in a car park early on June 15th, 2008.
Speaking today Fr Sheehy said he was one of the men who shook Foley’s hand because he wanted to “support him and let him know he was not alone”.
He said: “My Christian responsibility was to this person that I knew and to the person who is the object of, what I call, this extremely harsh sentence.”
Fr Sheehy said he didn’t know the victim but had he known her he “certainly would have shook her hand as well”.
Yesterday the judge criticised the character statement made by Fr Sheehy. The priest had said Foley was always “respectful of women”, but Foley’s actions “gave the lie” to Fr Sheehy’s statement, the judge said.
Fine Gael’s Frances Fitzgerald said it is “astonishing” that dozens of people queued up to shake hands and sympathise with Foley and said the experience of the victim in yesterday’s case “exposes the continuing social prejudice against victims of sexual crime”.
She said: “In light of the actions in the court house yesterday we must ask ourselves as a society, as a community, how we react to crimes of a sexual nature and the current level of support offered to victims of such crimes.”
Senator Fitzgerald called on the Minister for Justice to open a debate on how victims are treated in Ireland and the implications for the criminal justice system.