Court halts indecent assault trial

A businessman has secured a High Court order halting his trial on charges of indecent assault of three of his sisters over several years from when they were all children.

The man, now aged in his fifties, was alleged to have begun assaulting the girls on dates between 1965 and 1973 when he was aged eleven and they were aged seven, eight and eleven. All three women made formal complaints to the gardaí in 2007 and the man, who denies all the allegations, was later charged.

The man’s father, now in his late seventies, and another brother have separately been charged with indecent assault offences against the three sisters.

Mr Justice John McMenamim said the man and his sisters were among nine siblings who grew up in a family whose background circumstances were “apparently deeply dysfunctional”.

The father was allegedly violent and engaged in serious sexual misconduct with his children and was extremely domineering in his behaviour towards them and his wife.

The children’s mother died in the mid 1990s and, prior to her death, suffered a significant degree of mental illness.

The judge upheld arguments by the businessman there was a serious risk of an unfair trial arising from unavailability of evidence due to delay in making the complaints and the lapse of time.

He also found, in relation to one of the sisters, the exceptional circumstance of financial pressure on her and her admission she had asked the man to clear her debts, was itself sufficient to prohibit his trial in regard to her.

The man had alleged he had refused in 2004 to pay that sister’s debts any further and she then threatened to make allegations of a sexual nature against him and to have them plastered all over a newspaper. He also claimed her son threatened to kill him after his alleged refusal.

A range of unavailable evidence also specifically prejudiced the man’s right to a fair trial in relation to all three sisters, the judge ruled. An unusual factor in the case was every living member of this family had either accused another member of sexual interference or were themselves accused of such conduct and, in such complex circumstances, the impact of lost witnesses or evidence was more acute.

He noted one of the sisters had been placed in a home run by the Sisters of Charity in 1977 and a diary page apparently obtained from there recorded she “holds J. interfered with her sexually...and threw her out of the window”.

The judge said the reference was to her brother “J” but the applicant brother was “M”. There was no way of proving this document or its contents but, because the applicant claimed he was out of the family home from 1970, this was obviously relevant information.

This document, if its contents were proved, might raise serious questions whether the sexual abuse alleged against the applicant was correct, the judge said. An issue would arise whether she had identified the correct brother. There was also an issue whether this document, produced by the DPP, could ever be admissible as evidence. All of this constituted specific prejudice to the accused.

The judge also found the applicant was specifically prejudiced by the death of a Garda to whom he allegedly complained about the conduct of his father towards his sisters. The man had alleged his father knew the Garda in question and he believed that was why the matter did not go any further.

The applicant had also alleged he had complained to another Garda about 1966, when aged 12, about being physically abused by his father. That Garda, now a retired Assistant Commissioner, had been located but had no recollection of such a complaint which, the judge said, was unsurprising as the alleged complaint was said to have been made 43 years ago.