A Dublin man has been jailed for nine years for repeatedly sexually abusing his younger sister over 30 years ago.
The 52-year-old man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the now 39-year-old woman, was convicted by a Dublin Circuit Criminal Court jury last December following a trial.
He had pleaded not guilty to 16 counts of indecent assault at the family home on dates between March 1st, 1983 and March 1st, 1987 when the victim was aged between seven and 11 years old.
The court heard that the abuse came to an end when the girl had sex education in school and told her brother what he had been doing was wrong. She disclosed the abuse to their mother 13 years later but did not report it to the gardaí until June 2012.
The man met gardaí by appointment the following August but told them it was “lies” and suggested that his sister needed help.
Defence counsel Tara Burns SC, told Judge Martin Nolan her client is a father of two children who has a good work history. She handed in testimonials which described him as "a loyal and trustworthy employee", a good-natured person and a loyal family man.
Judge Nolan noted that the maximum penalty available was a prison sentence of 10 years. He said what made the offence “incredibly serious” was the number of times the man had sexually assaulted his younger sister, which he estimated was in excess of a couple of hundred times.
“You were an adult and she was a child. You must have known what you were doing was wrong and you continued to do it,” Judge Nolan said before he sentenced the man to nine years in prison.
Garda Daniel Connell told Roisin Lacey BL, prosecuting, that the woman later told gardaí her brother first abused her in the bedroom they shared around the time of her First Holy Communion. She said it continued four or five times a week for two years.
She later moved into a different bedroom with her sisters and the abuse started again during which time her brother tried to have sex with her but she stopped him, telling him it was too painful. She told gardaí that her brother told her it was their secret to keep between themselves and he would often give her sweets and money.
She was in fear of him and still looked up to him as her older brother.
Gda Connell said that no abuse occurred for about six months during the four years as the man was serving a prison sentence at the time and was not living in the family home. The woman outlined in her victim impact statement that as an adult she drank excessively and took painkillers to zone out from the abuse she suffered. She later started to self harm and went for counselling at Pieta House when suicide became “an everyday thought”.
“I cannot change my past. It will always be part of me. All I ever wanted to do was get justice,” the woman said before she added that she hoped to start the healing process now and become a better wife and mother.
The woman read from her victim impact statement. She said she blocked out the abuse from the time she was 11 to allow her to function every day. “I buried it. I was a fairly good child because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself in case my dirty secret came out,” she said.
She said in later years she was shocked by the flashbacks she would get of the abuse. She described it as mental torture. She said she felt like damaged goods and she couldn’t cope with every day reality. She felt both her marriage and her relationship with her children were affected.
“My husband threatened to leave because he didn’t know the person I had become,” the woman said before she outlined a history of excessive drinking and taking painkillers to allow her to “zone out the abuse”. She also began to self-harm and described cutting her legs in the same spot over and over.
“I used to see him driving around and doing everyday things. I would think how dare he go around as normal when I struggled to get out of bed everyday,” the woman continued.
She said she eventually disclosed the abuse to her husband and later to her children.