Man fails to stop his trial for buggery and rape said to have taken place 20 years ago

A man facing trial for alleged rape and buggery of a girl in Dublin 20 years ago has failed to have it stopped. At the High Court yesterday, Mr Justice Geoghegan said he was satisfied there was no serious risk of an unfair trial because of the delay in prosecuting the offences, alleged to have occurred between June 1979 and September 1980 when the alleged victim was seven or eight and the accused was a young adult.

The man denied the offences and claimed a trial would be unfair because, at this late stage, he would be unable to gather the evidence necessary to defend himself properly. The judge said if the trial went ahead, the woman's evidence would be that at the time there was a caravan on a building site in which two men lived, the younger of whom was the accused man. It was alleged the offences occurred when only she and the accused man were in the caravan.

The man admitted he did have a caravan on the site but claimed he sold it to a couple, whom he identified only by Christian names, some three months before the earliest date on which the offence was allegedly committed.

The girl told a friend about the incident shortly afterwards but did not tell any adult until 1994.

Mr Justice Geoghegan said the jurisprudence to be applied in applications to stop trials for sexual offences was now well established by the Supreme Court. It had stated the courts were not justified in disregarding delay merely because the alleged offence was of a sexual nature.

However, it had also stated the disparity in age between an accused and a complainant could be a possible explanation for failure to report. Delay might be further explicable where there was a quasi-position of trust between the par ties, such as parent or teacher.

The Supreme Court had said the issue was whether the court was satisfied that the circumstances were such as to explain the girl's inaction from the time of the alleged offence to the initiation of the prosecution. All the circumstances of each case must be considered in that regard.

In this case, Mr Justice Geoghegan said, he was satisfied on the evidence of a clinical psychologist that if the woman's allegations were true, there were sound reasons why she did not make an earlier complaint. It would have been an off-shoot of the man's own alleged misconduct which would have inhibited an earlier complaint.

The judge said he also considered that the accused man's ability to defend himself had not been so impaired that the trial should not proceed. He was satisfied the alibi of the couple to whom the caravan was allegedly sold was not a ground on which to take a view of a serious risk of an unfair trial.

The accused had to discharge a certain onus of proof to satisfy the court of such a serious risk, the judge said. It was easy to invent a dead or lost alibi and he was not impressed by the man's statement that he was unable to trace the couple. No details were given of any attempt to locate them.