A 42-year-old man has been jailed for seven months after he admitted sexually exploiting a 14-year-old girl with special needs when he persuaded her to send him intimate photographs of herself after engaging with her online.
Michael O'Regan of Assumption Place, Clonakilty, Co Cork, pleaded guilty at Clonmel Circuit Criminal Court to the exploitation of the child on a date between December 25th, 2016 and April 25th, 2017, contrary to Section 3 of the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act 1998.
Det Garda Michael Cussen had previously told the court that a man called to a garda station in Co Tipperary on April 25th, 2017 and reported that his 14-year-old daughter, who has Down syndrome, had been in contact with a number of men through an online site and had received and sent photos.
The girl’s father handed over her mobile phone and laptop to gardaí and they began an investigation and found that the mobile phone number used by the man most regularly in contact with the girl belonged to O’Regan.
Det Garda Cussen told the court that the victim was interviewed by a child specialist garda interviewer and she told the interviewer that she had sent a topless photo of herself to O’Regan after he had requested this of her.
Gardaí obtained a search warrant and searched O’Regan’s home in Clonakilty and he handed over his mobile phone and laptop and he later admitted during a voluntary interview that he had been in contact with the girl and had asked her to send a topless photo of herself to him.
Judge Eoin Garavan noted that a Probation Report on O'Regan found that, while he expressed remorse for his action, he lacked any real insight into his offending or real empathy for his victim.
He said that O’Regan could hardly have found “a more vulnerable victim” than a 14-year-old girl with Down syndrome and he had exploited her innocence by engaging in sexual exchanges online and asking her for a topless photograph. “It was utterly exploitative and cruel,” he said.
On Wednesday at Clonmel Circuit Criminal Court, Judge Garavan said that he believed a sentence of seven months was appropriate and he made it consecutive to the two year term O’Regan is currently serving from Cork Circuit Criminal Court in July 2019 for similar offences and he also ordered his name be placed on the Sex Offenders Register.
Earlier, defence barrister Suzanne Gorey BL had pleaded for leniency, pointing out that O'Regan had co-operated fully with gardaí and admitted the offence.
She said that O’Regan and his mother had sought to access psychological services for him, but since he had gone into custody on similar charges in 2019, he had been seeing a psychologist and he was due to see a psychotherapist in a bid to address the issues which led him to such offending.
She said he had gone online initially in the hope of meeting someone his own age but instead found himself developing a sexual interest in girls of a younger age, but he wanted to address these deviant urges as he did not want to have such feelings and desires.
Ms Gorey pointed out that O’Regan had twice attempted to take his own life and as a result of one attempt had suffered injuries to his back and now suffers from arthritis of the spine and the hands while he also suffered from high blood pressure and diabetes.
She said he had written a letter of apology to the court and she read from the letter in which O’Regan said he was not seeking to make excuses for his behaviour as he knew at all times that what he was doing in soliciting the image was wrong and he was genuinely remorseful.
He said in the letter that he had a lonely upbringing and was subjected to bullying and assaults while in school and he later became quite depressed and was struggling to deal with a voice inside his head which repeatedly called into question his self-worth.
Ms Gorey pointed out that O’Regan had obtained one image from the girl, had no physical contact with her and had never circulated the image to anyone and in fact had deleted it from his laptop when he realised that the girl might have special needs.
She said that she was not seeking to minimise the injury to the girl, who was clearly the victim in the case, but she believed that O’Regan was a victim of his own demons and while he did not believe he was a bad person, he accepted that he had exploited a child and should be punished for it.
