Man sentenced to 10 years for raping sisters

A Kildare man has been jailed for 10 years today by Mr Justice Paul Carney at the Central Criminal Court for the rape of his two younger sisters more than 40 years ago, which left one of the women suicidal.

The 62-year-old man pleaded guilty to five sample charges of raping the older sister and seven charges of raping the other woman at their Kildare family home on dates between June 1963 and January 1969.

He has one previous conviction from England for indecent assault in October 1965 for which he received a Stg£25 (€27.44) fine.

Mr Justice Carney imposed a 10-year sentence. He said he would not be ordering post-release supervision, taking into account the age of the accused on his release and the lack of garda attention in the last 40 years.

Garda Aisling Currams told Mr Paul McDermott SC, prosecuting, that the older sister was 14 years old when her brother started to rape her regularly in the yard of the family home, on a nearby bog when they were footing turf during the summer or in a wooded area close to the house.

The abuse stopped when she was 17-years-old after she moved out of the family home.

The accused then started to rape the younger sister, who was then aged 12 years old, and that continued for two and half years when her mother forced her to leave the home after learning of her brother’s behaviour.

She was also raped on a regular basis in the yard of the family home and in a field at the back of the house.

Mr McDermott read from a victim impact report from the older sister, who is now 60-years-old, which stated that she has tried to kill herself on numerous occasions by overdosing on pills or gassing herself. She said she has to take both antidepressants and sleeping tablets to “just get through the day”.

“I have been sentenced to a life of torment and shame until the day I die when I will have some relief,” the woman said in her statement. “My brother has tarnished everything I had to live for and has left me like a burnt stick”.

The younger sister, now aged 56, who said she can only sleep for one hour a day because she is still “haunted by nightmares”, stated that she often blamed herself and wondered if she could have stopped the abuse.

“My brother walks around with his head held high while I keep my head down in shame because of the abuse I suffered”, she said in her statement.

Both women told gardaí in their victim impact statements that they had been left with no education because their brother made them stay off school so he could abuse them and that the accused had destroyed their childhood and their chance of a normal upbringing.

They also both spoke of never having enjoyed a normal sex life with their husbands and both being overprotective of their children.

The old sister stated that she felt guilty when she left home because she knew that she had left her sister to suffer abuse at the hands of their brother.

Gda Currams said that the women first reported the abuse to gardaí in November 2005 after the accused moved into the same estate as the older sister and she became concerned for the safety of her children and grandchildren.

She agreed with Mr Barry Hickson SC, defending, that apart from the incidents of rape, the accused had not been violent towards his sisters.

She also accepted that he had not come to garda attention in the last 40 years.

Mr Hickson said that a clinical psychologist had assessed his client as being at a “low risk of re-offending” and of limited intelligence.

He asked Mr Justice Carney to accept his client’s plea of guilty and admissions to gardaí during interview and said that the accused was remorseful for his actions and realised what he had done was wrong.