Man charged with raping sisters has sentence halved on appeal

A Kildare man who pleaded guilty to repeatedly raping his two younger sisters over 40 years ago has succeeded in having nearly half of his prison term suspended on appeal.

The Court of Criminal Appeal today suspended the last four years of a ten year sentence which was handed down to the 63-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, by Mr Justice Paul Carney at the Central Criminal Court in October last year.

The man was sentenced to ten years in prison after he pleaded guilty to five sample charges of raping the elder sister and seven charges of raping the younger woman at their Kildare family home on dates between June 1963 and January 1969.

Counsel for the applicant, Mr Hugo Hynes SC, told the court that the sentence judge was “perhaps a little severe” in starting with a 12-year prison term, before reducing the sentence to ten years having considered the mitigating factors in the case.

Mr Hynes said that Mr Justice Carney ought to have had more regard to evidence that the children in the family, who shared the same bedroom, were unsupervised and “running wild” when the abuse began.

He said that the accused man had a serious lack of education and had little empathy for his victims – a consequence of his lack of awareness at the time that what he was doing was wrong.

Mr Hynes said that, in the 40-year gap between the offences and the imposition of sentence, the man had not come to the attention of gardaí.

He also said the man’s offending did not come under the same category as “a predator acting in a position of authority, preying on a young child”.

Presiding judge Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman, sitting with Mr Justice Declan Budd and Mr Justice Paul Gilligan, said the man and his victims were raised in the “most unusual” of family circumstances, even by the standards of the 1960s.

Mr Justice Hardiman said the court noted that the man was deemed to be at a low risk of reoffending and that he had not come to adverse garda attention in the 40 years since the cessation of the abuse.

In suspending the last four years of the sentence, he said the court did not consider the imposition of a ten-year sentence “unjustified”, but that the sentencing judge should have allowed for the suspension of part of the original prison term.

Mr Justice Hardiman directed that the man remove himself from a housing estate which is also home to one of the victims and banned him from approaching the injured parties or any members of their families.