A 60-year-old man from Ballinlough, Cork, who worked in the ESB for 40 years and had no previous convictions of any kind was jailed for 18 months yesterday for sexual assaults on a babysitter in the 1980s.

A 15-year-old who ordered a householder to strip naked as a kettle of boiling water was thrown at him during a burglary was sentenced to three years’ detention with the last year suspended for what the judge described as a terrifying and humiliating crime.