A married couple who subjected their six children to ongoing physical and emotional abuse were both jailed today when they appeared at Castlebar Circuit Criminal Court in Co Mayo.
The accused man was sentenced by Judge Sinéad McMullan to six years and three months in prison with the final nine months suspended for two years.
Along with his spouse, he admitted at a trial hearing earlier this year to multiple offences of child cruelty at a location in the west of Ireland between January 2018 and October 2021.
His wife was sentenced by Judge McMullan to three years and nine months in prison with the last nine months suspended.
READ MORE
The couple cannot be named publicly for legal reasons.
The couple’s wrongdoing was exposed by two of their older children who secretly recorded the ongoing physical and emotional abuse before fleeing their home and walking into a Garda station, where they handed over the audio evidence.
Afterwards the six siblings, who were aged from very young children to late teens when the abuse was first reported, were taken into care.
In all, 188 phone recordings were made by the teenagers. At a previous hearing, disturbing extracts from the recordings made by a teenage daughter were replayed in court.
In some recordings, children aged one and three can be heard crying as one of their parents slaps them repeatedly and screams abuse at them for not tidying their room or for not going to sleep. In another recording, the father is heard belittling and insulting his eldest daughter saying it was no “no wonder” the child had no friends. “Any decent person would steer a f**king mile away from you.”
During a previous court session, State prosecutor Patrick Reynolds was told by an investigating garda that the two children were afraid to return home to their parents after going to gardaí. Over the following 24 hours, all the children were placed in emergency care.
Gardaí said none of the children were upset leaving the house. One of the recordings included a 999 call made after the eldest son was beaten unconscious by his father.
The son later told gardaí his father had collected him from his part-time job that day and when he got into the car, his father poked him in the eye and punched him in the face with a closed fist. His nose was bleeding and as they drove home, his father assaulted him again and he fell in and out of consciousness.
In her lengthy judgment at today’s sentencing, Judge McMullan said the children should have felt safe in their home with their parents as their protectors but there was no safe place for them.
“Assault and abuse and cruelty to one’s children is, of course, an egregious breach of trust,” the judge said.
One of the aggravating factors, was that there were multiple victims and the abuse was very frequent, almost daily, over a long period of time.
The judge cited other aggravating factors, including the controlling and demeaning nature of the abuse and the fact it happened not only to the children but in front of other children on many occasions.
Judge McMullan described the children, now young adults, who gave evidence in the trial as “extraordinarily eloquent, intelligent, brave siblings and their actions in bringing the offences to light and reporting to the authorities brought an end to the abuse of their younger siblings and they should be very proud of that”.
The man’s prison sentence was backdated to August 27th, when he was taken into custody.
