A 68-year-old man who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing his daughter before denying it ever happened has been jailed for nine years, with the final year suspended.
The Dublin man added “further insult to trauma” on his daughter when he “flatly denied” to the Probation Service that he had indecently assaulted her, Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard on Monday.
The man, who cannot be named to protect his victim, pleaded guilty last July to five counts of indecently assaulting his daughter at their Dublin family home between April 1st, 1985 and December 31st, 1986 when she was aged between nine and 10 years old.
The court heard earlier this month that after entering those pleas, he was interviewed by the Probation Service and denied the abuse ever took place. “He said he had no idea why his daughter would make these allegations up,” Judge Elma Sheahan said.
The man sacked his legal team and appeared in court unrepresented on Monday, where he confirmed he did not want to change his guilty pleas.
“I’m guilty,” he told the court, adding he would feel “forever guilty” for his crimes. “What I did to (my daughter) was a terrible thing.”
Handing down sentence, Judge Sheahan said the man had engaged in “a serious breach of trust between a father and daughter”. She noted the “insidious nature” of the abuse and she commended the woman for her bravery.
“By resiling, however temporarily, from that [guilty] plea, there has been further insult to the trauma caused,” the judge said, adding the woman had lost the support of some of her own family members, “through no fault of her own”.
The judge handed down a nine-year sentence but suspended the final year on condition the man engage in all sexual abuse courses available to him in custody.
The daughter, who was in court for the sentence, broke down in tears after it was handed down.
In a emotional victim impact statement previously read out in court, she said she had spoken out because she wanted to stop abuse that had gone on in her father’s family for three generations. She believed her own father had also been a victim.
“I want the abuse in the family to stop with this generation,” she said, telling her father: “I forgive you.”
The court heard the indecent assault related to the man touching his daughter’s private parts, digital penetration and making her touch his private parts.
The abuse occurred when the girl was lying in bed and it escalated over time. She told gardaí she remembered thinking it was “wrong and disgusting”, although she didn’t really understand what was happening.
She said her father had warned her not to tell her mother about what he was doing as it would break up their family.
When she confronted her father about the abuse at a family function, he told her: “Shut the f**k up. The Jews had it worse than you.”
She described herself as being “stuck with a scared child inside fighting to be heard” until she finally went to gardaí in 2015.
She now found it hard to be around her own parents including her mother whom she described as “a chameleon who has no identity of her own”.
“I’m grieving the death of my parents, although they are still alive,” she said.