The Court of Appeal has upheld a 10-year prison sentence imposed on M.C. for 72 counts of indecent assault committed against a girl over almost six years in a north Dublin home.
M.C. was convicted by a jury in March 2019 after pleading not guilty. The complainant, born in 1966, was seven when the abuse began. M.C. was in a relationship with her mother and acted as her de facto stepfather.
The offences covered the period from October 1973 to August 1979. The complainant gave evidence of repeated sexual abuse occurring when her mother was away, often two or three times a week. The Circuit Court treated the offending as persistent, intense and involving a serious breach of trust.
The complainant’s victim impact statement described lifelong consequences including depression, difficulty forming relationships, addiction problems and problems in her relationship with her own children. By the time of trial she was living abroad, had been drug-free for four years and was receiving therapy and addiction counselling.
M.C. was 70 at trial. He had no previous sexual convictions, had a long work history and had not come to Garda attention for similar offending for decades. Those factors were treated as mitigation.
The sentencing judge imposed consecutive sentences on the first seven counts and concurrent sentences on the remainder, producing an overall 10-year term. On appeal, M.C. argued that the sentence was excessive and that using the maximum two-year headline term on individual counts wrongly treated the offending as being at the most serious level.
The Court of Appeal rejected that argument. It held that the conduct described by the complainant was indeed at the highest level of indecent assault, even by the standards of the 1970s, and that consecutive sentencing was necessary to reflect repeated abuse over a prolonged period.
The court also upheld the judge’s global sentencing approach. It did, however, caution against expressing component sentences in decimal fractions of months because that could create practical difficulties for prison warrants and release calculations.
The appeal was dismissed.