A solicitor acting for Wayne O'Donoghue has strongly rejected any suggestion his client was responsible for any kind of sexual abuse of his 11-year-old neighbour, Robert Holohan.
Frank Buttimer said his client, who was sentenced to four years imprisonment on Tuesday for the manslaughter of Robert Holohan, totally refuted any such suggestion.
This followed a claim by the boy's mother, Majella Holohan, that semen was found on her son's body and the emergence that an initial forensic report suggested that the semen belonged to O'Donoghue.
"I want to strongly deny on Wayne O'Donoghue's behalf that he is any kind of sex offender," said Mr Buttimer, adding that there was no evidence whatsoever introduced at his trial for murder last month to suggest any such behaviour by his client.
However, last night Mrs Holohan's solicitor, Ernest Cantillon, said Mrs Holohan was very upset that the veracity of what she said in her victim impact statement was being questioned.
"Mrs Holohan has total respect for the judicial process and has engaged fully with it. She made a number of statements in court on Tuesday when Wayne O'Donoghue was represented and she stands over each and every statement she made there," he said.
"What she said could have come as no surprise to Wayne O'Donoghue as it was all in the Garda file made available to him. He chose not to challenge it in the court but has come out now through his spokesman to cast doubt on the veracity of what she said. This is very unfair to Mrs Holohan."
Mr Cantillon made his comments as Mr Buttimer confirmed to The Irish Times that he had received of a number of reports from Forensic Science Service expert, Dr Jonathan Whitaker, from April 2005 as part of the prosecution book of evidence served against his client.
While Dr Whitaker's initial report linked O'Donoghue to a semen sample taken from Robert's left palm, he later expressed doubt following an analysis of a second semen sample taken from a bathroom mat in the defendant's house, which contained semen that was not identical to the semen from Robert's hand.
Mr Buttimer said that upon receipt of these reports as part of the book of evidence from the State, he forwarded them to independent forensic experts in Britain who came up with different findings and expressed major doubts about Dr Whitaker's first report.
Mr Buttimer said he then made the defence's forensic report available to the DPP and, following further discussions between them, the DPP "decided correctly to abandon the introduction of any such evidence" in O'Donoghue's trial.
"If there was any evidence whatsoever to suggest anything of that kind, the material would have been led by prosecution before the jury - all the evidence in the trial confirmed this from the pathologist down and that's the end of the matter," Mr Buttimer said.
During the trial at the Central Criminal Court in Cork, State Pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy said that during her post-mortem examination of Robert, she found "no evidence of a violent sexual assault" on the boy's body.
Mr Buttimer also disputed Mrs Holohan's contention that a picture of a poster in O'Donoghue's bedroom was found on Robert's phone which showed that the picture was taken at 7.32am on the morning of December 28th, 2004.
Mr Buttimer said this was an impossibility and pointed out that the defence had called evidence at the trial from Geraldine O'Connell from XtraVision in Midleton who confirmed that Robert only bought the phone at 11.15am on December 28th.
However, The Irish Times has learned that a Garda technical expert had examined the phone and concluded that its settings were out by 24 hours and two minutes, suggesting the poster photograph was taken at about 7.30am on December 29th and not December 28th.
Mr Buttimer said the defence would have challenged this evidence from a Garda technical expert on the time settings on the phone if it had been called and their information was that the phone settings related to p.m. as opposed to a.m. settings.
Mr Buttimer confirmed that O'Donoghue had intended addressing the sentence hearing along with his father, his former principal at Midleton CBS, Denis Ring and consultant psychiatrist, Dr Brian McCaffrey.
However, following Mrs Holohan's comments, which were not in her victim impact statement presented to the defence team, they decided to reconsider their position and did not go into any evidence from any of the four witnesses that they had planned to call, he said.