http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/1016/1224281252296.html
The Irish Times - Saturday, October 16, 2010
Man jailed for daughters' abuseANNE LUCEY in Tralee
AN 81-YEAR-old man was yesterday given an eight-year sentence at the Central Criminal Court in Tralee for the indecent assault of two of his daughters and the rape of one of them in their home in a Dublin suburb 45 years ago.
Six of the eight years were suspended on account of the man’s age and ill health.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the the offences had violated all civilised norms and the man had shown no remorse.
The judge also referred to the “life of poverty” the children had been left to suffer, which he said was worsened because of the sexual offences perpetrated.
The man, had vigorously denied the abuse of his daughters when they were children, at his trial at the Central Criminal Court in Tralee in April and May.
However, he was found guilty by majority verdict of 24 counts of indecent assault against one woman and two counts of rape and four of indecent assault against her older sister. The man had told the jury only a savage would rape a child and he was not a savage.
The sentencing was held in Tralee yesterday to facilitate the accused, who now lives in Kerry.
The trial heard the family lived in dire poverty in a Dublin suburb, and that the victims’ father left in the 1970s to set up home with another woman, whom he later married and with whom he had a family. He had at one time held two jobs and had been hard working, but his family had been impoverished, the court was told.
During the trial, which was held in camera, the rape victim told the court how her father would bring her upstairs into his bed, having sent the others to the cinema, when she was aged seven or eight.
She also told how she and her sisters slept in one double bed and her father would come home drunk and select the child nearest the bedroom door and interfere with her. The girls would take turns sleeping next to the door.
When her father left, her brothers began sexually assaulting her, she told the court. The woman said the brothers had learned it from her father.
The defendant suffers from what Mr Justice McCarthy yesterday described as “myriad” health complaints.
Mr Justice McCarthy noted submissions by Paul Greene, for the defence, that there had never been any complaints of a similar nature with regard to the man’s second family, who were now grown up. His wife had attended the court. In their victim impact statements yesterday, the two women told of suffering severe ongoing psychological problems and depression. “I have disowned my father in my heart for decades. Today, I disown him in public,” one of the victims said.