A man who violently beat his partner's three young children with a belt and an electrical flex, leaving them with multiple injuries, has been jailed for seven years by Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
Wayne Kinsella (33), Bawnlea Green, Tallaght, Dublin who has a long criminal record including a conviction for manslaughter, had put the three children aged 10, nine and eight, in different rooms at the address he shared with their mother and took turns beating them separately.
He told the eldest of the three children: "Whenever I look at you, I want to hit you," and beat the boy so violently he was left cut and bleeding, with more than 20 different injuries to all parts of his body.
He pleaded guilty to three counts of cruelty to the children at his home on a date unknown between August 31st and October 1st, 2003. The court heard that the children's mother had been pregnant with his child and had miscarried at three months, shortly before the incidents.
Mr Vincent Heneghan, prosecuting, said Kinsella made the boy strip down to his underpants and lie face down on the bed as he beat him with a belt. He then cut the flex from a lampshade and continued to hit the boy all over the body with it.
He then went to the next room where he beat the younger brother. Kinsella also lifted him up, threw him to the ground and hit the boy's face off the wall.
Next he went to the third room and beat the girl before going back to the room where the eldest boy was. He flipped the bed over to one side, dragged the boy out from underneath and resumed beating him. He did not stop until he was out of breath and panting from the exertion.
Throughout the beatings, Kinsella shouted loudly and repeatedly: "You made Ma lose the baby." After the beatings he threatened to kill them if they told their mother what he had done to them.
Garda Damien Dempsey said once when gardaí arrived at the house after receiving confidential information that the children might be in danger, Kinsella had put the two boys in a box and made them stay there until long after gardaí had gone. Gardaí took the girl into protection at the time and a few days later did the same with the two boys.
"I am very sorry. I will make it up to them. I just snapped that day. I had just lost the baby. It was totally out of character for me," Kinsella, who has 17 previous convictions, most involving violence, told Judge Michael White.
Judge White said the children had been in a very unfortunate situation in that they were completely at Kinsella's mercy as their mother had not been affording them appropriate care in such circumstances.
He described Kinsella as "a man with a predilection to violence" and sentenced him to four years for beating the eldest boy, and three years to run concurrently for each of the two other children.
Judge White told Kinsella he had abused a position of trust in which he had been with the children as the live-in partner of their mother. While he accepted his apology, he did not believe it had been spontaneous, as he had claimed.