A musician was sentenced to 11 months in Mountjoy Prison yesterday after pleading guilty to sexually abusing his daughter over a five-year period.
James Mullally (59), Marlinstown, Mullingar, Co Westmeath, pleaded guilty to the charges at Mullingar District Court. He can be named in the media after his daughter Aileen, who is now 28 and has been suicidal at times during her life, waived her right to anonymity.
Speaking after the court case, Ms Mullally said there had been a failure of the education system: "I sat in school day after day crying, and no one asked why."
It emerged that Mullally and his wife took her for child psychiatry after she complained of the abuse, but the psychiatrists were not told what the core problem was, nor did they get to the bottom of it themselves.
Garda Vincent Hoey told the court that the abuse happened when Ms Mullally was aged between three and eight. In the mornings, she would go into her parents' bedroom and when her mother got up to get the other children ready for school, her father would force her to perform oral sex on him.
After reading the victim impact report, Judge John Neilan said there was "a constant campaign of vilification" by Mullally and his wife to stop their daughter's complaints being heard.
"I was ignored. There's no amount of apologies that could ever give me back my life and childhood. The trust between a father and child is supposed to be sacrosanct, and not to be destroyed by disgusting behaviour," Ms Mullally told the court.
Mullally's barrister, Russell Houston, said his client had admitted to the charge when first approached by the gardaí. He had also pleaded guilty in court, and was a man of "impeccable reputation" and "well-known" in the region.
However, Judge Neilan said the only mitigating circumstance he could see in Mullally's favour was that he had pleaded guilty. The efforts by Mullally and his wife to dissuade the daughter from pursuing her complaints "added insult to injury", said the judge.
An effort was made to make his daughter look like "the problem", and "she had to address these issues herself". The attacks on Ms Mullally had taken place during "her most formative years".
Ms Mullally has suffered from depression from the age of 10.
Outside the court Ms Mullally thanked her fiancé Kevin Dunbar, uncle George Egan and his partner Laura Miller, who supported her "when I was very low". The allegations have splintered the family and a foster child with whom Ms Mullally grew up was in court to give evidence on behalf of the accused man.
"I am very happy with the sentence. The judge was very fair. I have been under a lot of pressure since making the complaint three or four years ago and there was a lot of waiting and worrying," Ms Mullally said.