A Co Clare resident who began sexually abusing his Limerick niece from the age of six will be sentenced next week at the Central Criminal Court.
The 48-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, later began raping the child from when she was aged nine on a regular basis in his bedsit in Co Clare.
The court heard how the child would beg her mother not to let her stay over with him, telling her mother: “Please Mum, don’t let me go, I’ll be good”.
During the trial the victim said her mother would still let her uncle take the child to the flat every few weeks.
While staying over with him the man would sexually assault her.
Last December a jury found him guilty of eight counts of rape and 17 counts of sexual assault of the child between October 1998 and April 2003.
The man had pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to 32 counts of raping and assaulting the woman causing her harm between October 1998 and October 2004. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on seven counts.
Mr Justice Paul Carney remanded the man in continuing custody for sentence next Monday.
After his arrest in 2012 the man told gardaí that the victim was a liar. He said that he had taken care of her and her siblings because their parents were alcoholics and were unable to look after them.
He claimed that she was making these allegations because of a fist fight between him and her father in 2010.
The man has previous convictions dating from 1984 to 2012 for assault and road traffic public order offences.
In her victim impact report the woman, now in her early 20s, said that instead of looking after her, uncle had ruined her childhood. Describing her anxiousness at visiting his flat knowing the abuse she would suffer there each time, she said: “I used to be frightened for my life”.
She said she turned to alcohol at a young age. Det Garda Michael Kelly told Anne-Marie Lawlor BL, prosecuting, that the man gave her poitín and other alcohol to get her to carry out sexual acts on him.
The victim realised the man was recording the abuse when on one occasion he played video footage of it to her. He would also play pornographic movies to her.
He would buy her clothes and jewellery and bring her to the cinema. These were novelties for her as she did not get gifts at home. She told the court these were a form of bribery.
In 2010 her uncle met her and showed her a photograph of her as a child and told her it was a picture he had taken after a sexual act. She said she felt sick and disgusted. She went to gardaí to report the abuse the following year.