An unemployed man with a Masters degree in philosophy who downloaded 3,500 child pornography images in an Internet cafe has had his sentence adjourned by Judge Desmond Hogan.
Counsel for Mr Adrian Savage (40), Millwood Terrace, Meath Road, Bray, said there was a treatment place available for him at the Granada Institute starting in September and his sentence was adjourned until November 4th.
Judge Hogan said he was concerned about the possibility of Mr Savage re-offending because he had started to catalogue up to 3,500 child pornographic images, 400 of which were explicit.
He had downloaded the 3,500 images in a nine-month period by spending entire nights in the cafe.
Det Sgt Mark Kavanagh told Mr Hugo Hynes BL, prosecuting, that Mr Savage was arrested after gardaí observed him entering a cafe on Dame Street, Dublin at 10 p.m one night and not leaving until 10 a.m the following morning. He was stopped and produced an envelope which contained 80 child pornography images on A4 paper.
The images were of girls, either fully or semi-naked, and eight of the pictures were close-ups of young females. He admitted he had more explicit pictures in his home where gardaí found 32 envelopes with the images arranged in folders and files. Each envelope contained approximately 110 images and in total they seized 3,500 pictures. The majority of the pictures were of semi-naked young girls but only about 400 of the images were explicit and showed the victims engaged in sexual activities with adults.
Mr Savage pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to two counts of knowingly having child pornography on February 9th, 2002. Judge Hogan said he had the benefit of a positive probation report and it was not a case where Mr Savage was paying money over the Internet for the images but was accessing them from free sites. He also had no previous convictions.
Judge Hogan said the idea of seeing what progress Mr Savage made during a programme of supervision didn't seem like a bad suggestion. Det Sgt Kavanagh agreed with Mr Grehan that Mr Savage, who didn't have his own computer, was not distributing the images and made no money out of it.
He was a highly educated man who had completed a degree at UCD before going on to do a Masters in philosophy at Trinity College. The English department at UCD then gave him the opportunity to do a PhD but he had to turn it down because of financial constraints.
Despite his high standard of education he had never worked because he was overqualified for some jobs and not qualified enough for others. He lived in a small bed-sit and didn't realise what he was doing was wrong.