Second daughter testifies against father at rape trial

A second daughter of a 73-year-old Dublin man has alleged at the Central Criminal Court that she was repeatedly sexually abused by him as a child.

The man has pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting and raping two daughters between the ages of four and 11 and sexually assaulting a son from the age of three to six at various locations between 1995 and 2002.

The man’s now 18-year-old daughter told Ms Isobel Kennedy SC, prosecuting, that she slept upstairs in a bedroom with two siblings while her older sister, who gave evidence of alleged abuse by their father last week, slept downstairs on a red couch in the sitting room.

She told Ms Kennedy that her father would sexually abuse and rape her “in the sitting room, his room, my room or the car” and that the abuse started when she was about four years old.

She said her father would get her on her own and rape her. She said he would take his clothes off but as she got older she refused to take her own clothes off.

The witness said she told her father it hurt her but he told her it would only make it worse if she fought. He allegedly told her it was their secret and not to tell her mother.

She told Ms Kennedy she would also be abused by her father while she was in the bath or in a van owned by her father.

She said the abuse in the van began when she was about five years old and went on a couple of times a week.

She agreed with Ms Kennedy that she and her sister were taken into a care home but often ran away and went back to their mother and father.

She said her sister had a mobile phone and would ring their father. He would collect them and bring them up the mountains and abuse them. He would also take them to a caravan where they were abused.

She said she went home to live with her parents for a time around her ninth birthday but when they were supposed to go back into care the family “ran off” down the country until just before Halloween 2001.

She said her father abused her during this time in a spare room in the house the family were staying in.

She agreed that she went then back into care but continued to run away from the care home. She said when they stayed with their father he would abuse her and it “hurt like hell”.

The witness told Mr Blaise O’Carroll SC, defending, during cross examination, that her first memories were going to school when she was four years old. She agreed she was close to her older sister but denied that she would go along with something if her sister wanted to do it.

She denied that she was mistaken about the sleeping arrangements in the house.

She told Mr O’Carroll that she “did not talk to anyone” about the abuse. She said she got on “OK” with her mother but did not talk to her “about anything”.

She said she “didn’t know” where her mother was when she was being abused. “I don’t know how she didn’t know,” she told Mr O’Carroll.

The witness disagreed with Mr O’Carroll that the children were “well fed at home” prior to going into care.

“Mam didn’t always have enough money to feed us all, so if we had to do without, we had to do without,” she said. This would happen “about twice a week”.

She agreed that the house was a “fun place for kids” and said they could “go anywhere we wanted” in the house.

She told Mr O’Carroll that she had run away from the care home “at least 100 times” and that she was abused on “about 25 or so” of these occasions.

When asked by Mr O’Carroll why she would keep returning to a home where she was allegedly sexually abused, she said: “’Cos I did not know it was wrong. They were my parents I loved them and I wanted to go home.”

Earlier the first daughter to give evidence of the alleged abuse told Ms Kennedy, during reexamination, that she did not tell her mother about the abuse “because I thought it was normal”.

The now 19-year-old woman told Ms Kennedy that she was six years old when she alleges her father was repeatedly raping her in the mornings before she went to school.

The trial continues before Mr Justice George Birmingham and a jury of eight men and four women.