Donegal man to be sentenced in December after rape conviction
Friday, October 24, 2008 - 03:30 PM
A Donegal man has been convicted of both raping and sexually assaulting his wife's niece over a three-year period 15 years ago.
The 50-year-old man had pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to 11 charges of rape and 22 charges of sexual assault on dates between April 1, 1993 and June 15, 1996 when she was aged between 11 and 15 years old.
The jury of seven women and five men unanimously found the accused guilty of 15 charges of sexual assault and 11 charges of rape on day-eight of the trial having spent over fours hours deliberating and an overnight stay in a hotel.
Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne indicated that they should record a verdict of "not guilty by direction of the trial judge" on seven charges of sexual assault.
She thanked the members of the jury for its "patience and service" for what she said would have been a "very hard experience" for them before she excused them from jury service for seven years.
Ms Justice Dunne ordered that the accused be registered as a sex offender and remanded him on continuing bail to a sentence date next December.
The now 27-year-old complainant told Mr Richard Lyons SC (with Mr Sean Gillane BL), during the trial, that her uncle-in-law regularly "forced himself on me" when she was 12 years old and staying in his home for the weekend.
She said she would kick the accused with her legs and shout at him to stop, without success. "I would curse at him, every possible one I could think of."
Asked by counsel how the accused would react to her, she replied: "He would do nothing. It didn't matter what I did, he was going to do what he wanted to anyway."
She told Mr Lyons that when she stayed with the accused, her cousins, his children, would call her to go to Mass with them on Sunday mornings but he would tell them to leave her to sleep on.
Her aunt would be out working in a nearby shop so the house was empty.
She said she thought she was 12 years old when this first happened and that it would happen every Sunday "in the exact same way" when she stayed at their home "for a break".
She said she attended her cousin's birthday party in her uncle's home in March 1993 and the following month she stayed again for the weekend.
She told Mr Lyons that she was asleep in bed when she woke up to find him touching her but she said she "wasn't 100 percent sure where he touched me".
She said she stayed almost every weekend with her aunt and uncle and the accused would come into her room "quite frequently" and touch her before it progressed later to him having sex with her.
She said that in 1994 while she was in the accused's car with him he asked her to perform oral sex on him.
She told Mr Lyons that she agreed to do so because "he kept asking, asking and asking" and if she didn't do it for him he would keep asking.
The complainant said she didn't "entirely understand" what it was. She felt disgusted and she didn't want to do it.
She said he used to buy her clothes and jewellery, including a T-bar necklace, silver rings and a watch.
She told Mr Lyons she moved abroad sometime after making her complaint to gardaí and the accused rang her to ask her to come home and "sort things out".
"He said that I had made allegations against him and he said that he had never touched me," she added.
