Gerard Lynch, a Garda sergeant, was convicted yesterday of seeking sex with a 13-year-old in a Limerick brothel. Sentencing was adjourned to November 1st for medical and psychiatric reports. The 40-year-old Malahide-based officer could receive up to 12 months' imprisonment, or a fine of up to £1,000, or both.
Judge Gerard Haughton convicted him after a three-day trial in which he claimed he was on a "solo investigation" of the abuse of a 15-year-old girl from his district when he was arrested in the Erotica brothel in Limerick.
Judge Haughton said he did not believe Lynch's evidence. "I believe he was there for the purposes of soliciting a young child for sex and I am convicting him."
As to Lynch's claim that he was involved in the case of the missing girl in his own locality, Judge Haughton said there was "not one single note" about this on the Garda file.
The trial at Dublin District Court was told that when arrested in the brothel on June 12th last year Lynch had with him £250 in cash, a tube of KY lubricating jelly and a pair of women's G-string knickers.
He was secretly taped and filmed discussing the type of young girl he liked and suggested at one stage that he would never "use" one younger than eight years.
Lynch, a former Garda presenter on RTE's Crimeline programme, said that he had been concerned that the lack of progress on the missing 15-year-old in his district would reflect badly on him.
After receiving an anonymous phone call in late March he had decided to carry out an investigation himself. This involved ringing up a Limerick sex shop called Utopia and the Erotica brothel.
He claimed that another 400 calls around the same time to a chat/dating line was just a way of relieving stress he suffered due to having Crohn's disease. The medication he took for this affected his judgment at times and this accounted for what he described as being "naive and very foolish" in not notifying his superiors about his solo investigation.
The reason he had gone into such detail about what type of sex he proposed with a 13-year-old was part of the role he was "acting" to convince the brothel operator that he was genuine.