Tipperary man loses sentence appeal after convictions for offences against daughter

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

A Tipperary man’s appeal against his sentence for raping and sexually assaulting his daughter was dismissed by the Court of Appeal on 17 October 2022. It was his second unsuccessful appeal in the case.

The man, who cannot be named to protect his daughter’s identity, initially pleaded not guilty to 32 counts of sexual offences. Following legal submissions at his Central Criminal Court trial, Ms Justice Eileen Creedon directed the jury to find him not guilty on 17 counts. The jury acquitted him on a further ten and convicted him on five, including rape, oral rape and sexual assaults.

The offences occurred between January 2003 and December 2004 and on a separate occasion in January 2011. The court heard that he raped his daughter twice and sexually assaulted her when she was 22. He also sexually assaulted her and forced her to perform oral sex when she was aged 13 or 14.

In February 2020, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, with the final year suspended. The proceedings were reported on 17 October 2022.

At the sentence appeal, Colman Cody SC argued that the sentence was excessive. Fiona Murphy SC, for the State, said it was carefully constructed and referred to coercive efforts to make the victim withdraw the charges. Giving judgment, Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy dismissed the appeal, citing the daughter’s acute intellectual disability and the heightened betrayal of trust as aggravating factors.

His earlier conviction appeal challenged the trial judge’s treatment of corroboration concerning evidence from the complainant’s mother. The Court of Appeal dismissed it. The report said the daughter had told a psychologist that she made up the allegations; she told the jury she had said this because her father told her to and she feared her younger siblings would be taken away.