Some of the victims and their families who suffered at the hands of serial abuser James Lombard, Blarney Street, Cork, expressed disappointment at the seven-year sentence, with two years suspended, handed down yesterday at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
The victims, who were aged between four and 10 years of age when they were abused in Cork by Lombard, are now all young men and women.
Together with their parents they said they were disappointed by Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin's sentence.
The father of one victim, who was 10 years old when Lombard forced him to strip in a fast-food toilet cubicle before assaulting him, spoke of the family's disappointment.
He said he expected he would have been jailed for 10 years at least, given the huge number of children he abused and the fact that they were all so young.
"The other thing is that this has been going so long. He fled to England back in 1995 and then he fled again on the last day of his trial in February, dragging it out again for all his victims.
"That really added to the trauma for them and that should have been reflected in the sentence."
The boy's mother added: "He's got seven years with two years suspended, so he has five years to serve. But with remission, he'll be out in four years or less, whereas all our children, they will have to live with what he did to them for the rest of their lives."
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