Man told gardaí that sex with sister, 4, was consensual

A man who, as a 12-year-old consistently raped and molested his four-year-old sister, told gardaí during interview 40 years later that the sex was consensual.

The 57-year-old father of seven pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to four counts of rape and four counts of indecent assault on dates between December 1971 and October 1973. His sister was aged between four and six at the time.

Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy adjourned the case for sentence to next Tuesday.

The now 49-year-old woman read from her victim impact report that she did not feel like she had her “own identity because the abuse is so ingrained in me”.

“I’ve been in prison in my own body and mind. I can never get those years back,” the woman said after commenting that her brother “walks around free”.

She said that, as a child, she was full of fear, afraid to go out and afraid to stay in.

She described wearing loads of clothes and hiding under beds, “but he always got to me. It became a waiting game. There was no escaping.”

She said she would never be able to forget the horrors of the abuse and she lived in constant fear every day that her brother would get her.

“I’ve never known what a normal life is and never will,” the woman said before she added that the chances of that “ended the first day he raped me”.

Tara Burns SC, prosecuting, told the court that the man had pleaded guilty to sample counts and said the abuse occurred at least two or three times per week.

The woman told gardaí that she remembered her brother raping her while she was watching television at home and her mother was speaking to a neighbour across the street. He sexually assaulted her first after lifting her skirt before taking off her underwear and raping her.

The man told his then five-year-old sister that their father would kill her for not wearing her underwear before he put them in his pocket.

She recalled another incident when the family were celebrating another brother’s wedding and the accused forced her to perform oral sex on him while she was sitting on the toilet. She vomited afterwards.