AN ACTOR and a former courier who had sex with a 14-year-old boy after they first met him through a gay website have been jailed for two years by Judge Martin Nolan at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
Former Fair City actor Patrick Dunleavy (42), Sherrard Street Lower, Dublin, pleaded guilty to engaging in a sexual act with the boy in January 2007, while Thomas Rogers (45), St Catherine’s Avenue, Rush, Co Dublin, pleaded guilty to two charges of engaging in a sexual act with him in January and February 2007.
Neither man had previous convictions. Judge Nolan ordered that they both be registered as sex offenders.
The boy had created a profile on www.gaydar.ie stating he was aged 19. Both men later acknowledged in Garda interviews that the teenager admitted on meeting them that he was only 15; in fact he was a couple of weeks away from his 15th birthday. Both men agreed that they were aware that the age of consent was 17.
Garda Darra Hynes told Anne Rowland, prosecuting, that the boy had arranged to meet both men after exchanging phone numbers through the website.
He also met two other men but he admitted that nothing happened with them because they had said on seeing him that it was obvious he was under age. One had said: “I don’t want to go to jail.”
Garda Hynes told Ms Rowland that the teenager’s mother contacted gardaí after she found suggestive text messages from these men and nude photographs of her son on his phone.
Her partner texted Rogers, having found the number on the boy’s phone, and arranged to meet him after purporting to be another young man. The man followed Rogers after he texted to say he would not make the appointment, and supplied Rogers’s address and car registration to gardaí.
Judge Nolan said that neither Dunleavy nor Rogers “groomed this young man or enticed him to meet them” and accepted that it was “undisputed” that the boy had “for his own reasons” contacted the site himself.
Judge Nolan added that he must impose a custodial sentence after he was advised that the maximum penalty was five years in prison. He said he had taken into account their remorse and their co-operation with gardaí.
