Mother of rape victims: ‘A living nightmare that I can’t wake up from’

Mother of young victim details family anguish as man gets life sentences for rape of girls, aged 6 and 9

The mother of a 9-year-old girl raped after being lured away from a party said since the attack she is living a nightmare that she can’t wake up from.

In her victim impact statement, the mother said her attacker made a cold predatory decision to rape her daughter. “He made her believe in her little heart that she would die if she didn’t comply. He gratified himself on the body of an innocent child.”

The Galway man, who lured two girls away from the children’s birthday party, told them he would cut their parents’ throats before repeatedly raping them. Yesterday he was jailed for life.

The 30-year-old lured the 6 and 9-year-old girls from a park where they were playing and repeatedly forced them both to have oral and anal sex with him.

The mother of the 9-year-old said she lies awake at night tormented by unbearable images and that she imagines hearing her child’s heart beating in fear.

She said her daughter has gone from being a happy exuberant child to a worried reserved person who doesn’t feel safe anymore.

The father of the 6-year-old sobbed while reading through his victim impact statement in which he said hearing his child first tell him what the man had done to her was “like a bomb going off” in his head.

He said his daughter has repeatedly asked him about why the accused did what he did. She described the pain of the rape as cutting like a knife.

He said she freezes or panics when she sees “creepy men everywhere, every day” and refused to be on her own at any time, including at night time.

He said the idea that she had to perform oral sex after being anally raped was “incredulous and deplorable”, adding “this just blows your mind” to know her mouth was used in such a “disgusting and abusive way”.

In a poem, he wrote and read out in court he asked: “What can a Daddy do to protect this princess beauty? Are we lost to evil?”

Sentencing the 30-year-old to life on each count, Mr Justice Paul Carney said he found it too upsetting to recite the facts of the case.

He said it was too serious a case for any discount in sentence to come from the accused’s co-operation with gardaí after his arrest or from his early plea of guilty. After sentence was passed, the 30-year-old asked to apologise to the victims. The court heard he had a number of previous convictions, but none for sexual assault.

The ISPCC said the sentence reflected the depravity of the crime committed and sends a very clear message that this crime is unacceptable and will be punished.

“While we welcome this particular sentence, the ISPCC recommends that sentencing guidelines are put in place as soon as possible so we as a society are not relying on a particular judge’s discretion when delivering sentences but rather there is a clear pathway that judges can utilise in determining an appropriate sentence,” said Caroline O’Sullivan, director of services.

Fiona Neary, executive director of Rape Crisis Network Ireland, said justice was delivered.

“A life sentence is appropriate in the most serious incidents of sexual violence crime, including exceptional cases where there is an early guilty plea. This is such a case,” she said.