A MAN has been jailed for 10 years after he was convicted by a jury of continually raping and sexually assaulting his daughter from the time she was seven years old.
The 49-year-old man had pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to 32 counts of rape, oral rape and sexual assault of his daughter in Carlow, Kildare and Laois between June 17th, 1991, and June 30th, 2000.
Mr Justice Paul Carney had earlier directed the jury to return not guilty verdicts on a further 40 counts after legal argument.
The jury had taken more than seven hours to convict the man of one count of oral rape, one of sexual assault and 20 counts of rape at the trial last November.
He was acquitted of two counts of sexual assault and the jury disagreed on a further six counts of rape and two of sexual assault.
Peter Finlay SC, defending, told Mr Justice Carney that his client still maintained his innocence.
The now 25-year-old woman read from a victim impact statement that all she ever wanted was a genuine apology from her father and acceptance for what he had done.
“I did not want to go to court and talk about these things in public, but the court process has helped me,” she said.
“From the age of seven, my innocence was taken from me. I was sexualised at a very young age,” she told Conor Devally SC, prosecuting, before describing how she suffered with bulimia since she was 11 years old and was suicidal from the time she was in secondary school.
“It was the only thing I could control,” she said of her eating disorder, before she added that she imagined death at a very young age and suffered panic attacks.
She was often brought to her local GP but she said she had never disclosed to him why she was so sad.
“People used to tell me I looked like my father’s family because of my hair colour and I hated any resemblance I had to him,” the woman said.
She described having a destructive relationship with her mother and said she always feared that if the abuse ever came to light that her brothers and sisters would resent her because it would mean the loss of their father.
The woman said she led a double life as a teenager because it was the only way she could cope. She found adult sex completely overwhelming and she had difficulty trusting people. She envied others who had a good relationship with their father.
She told the court that she used to feel sorry for her father but she has since learned, with the help of ongoing counselling, that he was not her responsibility.
Mr Devally told the court that the Director of Public Prosecutions put the offences at the upper end of the scale, considering the level of premeditation, “the enormous continuous breach of father-daughter trust”, the multiple charges and the nature of the crimes.
Mr Justice Carney said the man has deprived himself of the most “fruitful form of mitigation” as he still maintained his innocence and as such has not demonstrated any remorse.
He said he had taken into account the gravity of the offence, the gross breach of trust, the age of the victim, the frequency of the abuse and the effect the crimes had on the woman.
The judge added that he had also taken into consideration the man’s previous “clean record” and character references.
He declared him a sex offender and ordered that he undergo five years post-release supervision.
The man’s employer told Mr Finlay that he could not speak highly enough of his former employee and described him as “a first-class man”. He said that he had often left his own children under the man’s care.
The accused’s partner told the court that the man was “honest, salt of the earth, very reliable and my best friend”.
“I am very lucky to have him in my life. He has shown great strength of character for living with this case for the last three years,” she told Mr Finlay.