By Robbie Byrne with additional reporting by Alison O'Riordan
A 58-year-old father-of-five from Tipperary has been jailed for 16 years for raping a 6-month-old baby.
The offending incidents took place over the course of seven months up to August 2019. The man cannot be named in order to protect the identities of the victims.
The individual was caught after someone anonymously handed a memory card with videos of the abuse into Gardaí with a note asking them to arrest “this monster”.
The baby was the 58-year-old's girlfriend’s niece.
Video clips
In a court hearing last week, the detective testified that an examination of the memory card revealed 20 video clips, each lasting three minutes, of female adults and female children using a toilet in a bathroom in the accused's home.
The Central Criminal Court heard that four of the video files showed four female children individually using the toilet. The defendant could be seen coming into the bathroom and fixing the position of the camera in the majority of the clips.
The court heard that the accused man was in a relationship with a woman since 2012 and the couple would mind her nieces from time to time in the defendant's flat.
The woman told gardaí that she would occasionally leave the man alone with the young children if she was going to the shops and said she was unaware of events that had taken place. She said the accused had a "pattern" of checking whether the toilet was clean before the children used it.
Baby
The witness said that three explicit video files had shown the defendant performing a sex act as the six-month-old infant lay in her pram, while another video showed him sexually abusing the baby.
The baby could be heard screaming, making choking noises and crying "intensely" in the videos, the detective testified during the hearing today.
The man pleaded guilty last year to two counts of oral rape, one count of attempted rape and five counts of sexual assault of the then six-month-old baby.
He also pleaded guilty to five counts of production of child pornography of the baby and the four older children. He further pleaded guilty to four counts of possession of child pornography at his home in the midlands on dates from February to August 2019.
'He is a monster'
In an emotional victim impact statement, one mother said she was introduced to the accused man seven years ago and welcomed him into their family home.
She said she could not believe that the man had done "such horrific things" to her daughters and was grateful that they are young enough to move on with their lives.
She said she no longer leaves her children with anyone and knows that she will have to explain to them what happened some day. "He is a monster and is where he should be today," she said.
Another mother told the court in her statement that she had trusted the accused and thought he had her children's best interests at heart. "In my worst nightmare I could never have imagined it. I find now that when I need to use the bathroom I'm scanning it to make sure me or the children are not being recorded," she said.
Coleman Cody SC, defending, said that the level of criminality was impossible to comprehend and the aggravating factors included the disparity in ages between his client and the victims as well as the breach of trust.
"There was a degree of planning employed by him and the recording of these incidences provided him with a source of gratification," he said.
Counsel said it was quite obvious that the victims do not have any knowledge of what had happened and the harm caused seemed to be "at a minimum or relatively non-existent".
In mitigation, Mr Cody said his client became addicted to cocaine, and it had become a destabilising factor in his life. He said his client accepted that he would receive a serious custodial sentence for the offences.
