A man who sexually abused his eldest daughter over 24 years ago has been sentenced to six years in jail by Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. Judge Donagh McDonagh suspended the final two years of the sentence but said he "entertained doubts" as to the "genuineness" of the defendant's remorse.
The Dublin man (51) pleaded guilty to five sample charges of sexual assault on his then seven to nine-year-old daughter between October 1980 and December 1982. Judge McDonagh said he had employed "terror tactics" and had "commanded her silence".
Garda Cliona O'Brien told Caroline Cummings, prosecuting, that the woman first made a complaint when she was 16 years old but her mother discouraged her from taking it any further. Her father warned her that if she ever told anyone he and her mother would get a divorce and she and her siblings would be put in care and she would never see them again.
Dr Davina Walsh from the Granada Institute told Patrick Gageby SC, defending, that the defendant did not fit the criteria of a person who had "natural paedophiliac tendencies" and he was at a low risk of reoffending. She said he married while still an adolescent and was not emotionally matured.
He could not cope with the pressures of fatherhood and this, coupled with financial pressure and the death of a child in the 80s, led to him having "a sexualised relationship with his daughter".
Judge McDonagh said he had difficulties with this evidence and questioned why the defendant had gone to the Granada Institute only after his daughter had made a complaint to gardaí. He said the defendant was "no callow youth" when he "well and truly sexualised his child".