Mother ‘out drinking’ at time of sex attacks

A WOMAN who claims she was raped and sexually assaulted when she was 12 by a man who was babysitting her younger siblings told the trial yesterday her mother was always out drinking at the time of the attacks in December 2001.

A 42-year-old man has denied raping and sexually assaulting the woman in the bedroom of her home, and denied the rape and sexual assault of her then nine-year-old sister in a house in Kerry.

A jury of six men and six women have been sworn in at the Central Criminal Court, sitting in Tralee, to try the man on 11 counts of a sexual nature.

The woman yesterday said she was a bit of a troublemaker at the time, and that she drank.

“I was drinking when I was very young,” she told Anthony Sammon SC.

Asked what her mother’s view of her drinking was, she said: “My mother didn’t really have a view because she wasn’t really there. She was out drinking every day.”

On the night of the rape her mother had been out with her then boyfriend. Her mother and he would fight a lot when they were drunk, the woman said. He had moved in a few weeks after they met, she said.

She said she knew her mother’s boyfriend had a conviction for unlawful carnal knowledge and said that, at first, there were rumours in the area that it was he who had assaulted the sisters. However, this was not true, she told Isobel Kennedy SC, for the prosecution.

The former boyfriend of the victim’s mother also took the stand as a prosecution witness. Under cross-examination by Mr Sammon, he said he had been convicted of unlawful carnal knowledge of a 16-year-old girl in 2000.

The trial continues before Mr Justice Barry White in camera, meaning the public are excluded and the parties cannot be named.