Child abuser to ‘serve’ his sentence at home

The sexual abuser of a child is to have his home turned into his prison cell for the next five years for a crime he committed 35 years ago.

Eugene O’Sullivan, aged 59, of Dun Orga, Dunmanway, Co Cork, was given a five-year prison sentence yesterday which, in effect, he will serve in his own home.

Judge Donagh McDonagh yesterday said it was with reluctance that he was suspending the five-year sentence but was doing so on the man’s undertaking to stay within the curtilage of his home for the next five years.

“I will suspend it on his entering a bond to have no contact of any nature with the injured party or her family, that he remain within the curtilage of his dwelling for the period of five years,” the judge said, adding O’Sullivan could leave his home for all medical appointments and hospital treatment.

“If it crosses his mind to attend church, chapel, or meeting house he would be permitted so do do,” Judge McDonagh said.

“These terms are to replace his home for a prison cell. Any deviation should immediately be reported to the court and I will impose the prison sentence.”

The judge said the victim impact statement, which the complainant did not want to have read in public, was the most articulate, eloquent and moving he had even seen outlining how crimes of this nature affected innocent children through their childhood and into adult life.

The accused was remanded in custody a fortnight ago following his pleas of guilty to indecently assaulting a girl in West Cork when she was six years old and he was 25. O’Sullivan’s name will also go on the sex offenders register.

Sergeant Aidan Moynihan said at Cork Circuit Criminal Court that the incident assault occurred on an afternoon in the early 1980s.

The girl asked O’Sullivan to get something for her. He said he would but produced his penis and told her to put it in her mouth first and the child did so.

It was not until the injured party was 19 that she felt she could tell an aunt and it was some further time before she told her mother. Sgt Moynihan said she was in counselling from 1995 to 2012, when she went to her local garda station and made a complaint of indecent assault.

The injured party said she did not want any of the parties identified and did not want the accused to be jailed.

Brian McInerney, defending, said the accused now suffered serious ill health. “He is deeply ashamed of his actions, he has had to live with this in the back of his mind,” he said. “He accepts there is a certain degree of fate seeking to even the scales in terms of injuries which have befallen him.”

Mr McInerney said he was flabbergasted by the extraordinary Christian attitude taken by the complainant.

“One could understand feelings of revenge or vengeance but she fails to see how it would achieve anything other than letting a sick man die in prison,” Mr McInerney said. He quoted the complainant asking what justice there would be in jailing O’Sullivan at this stage.