Co Armagh paedophile, found guilty of abusing three girls including his two sisters, jailed for 10 years

Ordering the 63-year-old defendant to spend half his sentence in jail and half on licence, Judge Roseanne McCormick KC revealed that, despite guilty jury verdicts in two separate trials, the defendant still maintains his innocence.

Outlining how the pervert, who cannot be identified in order to protect his victims’ identity, routinely abused his sisters over almost 20 years, the Antrim Crown Court judge said she was satisfied his offences ‘can rightly be described as a campaign of abuse’.

“These occurred in the family home, most of the abuse occurred in their bedrooms, in a place these two young girls should have felt most safe,” said Judge McCormick.

Following two separate trials earlier this year, the 63-year-old Co. Armagh man was convicted of a total of 14 offences of indecent assault and one attempted indecent assault, committed over various dates between 2 October 1972 and 1 January 1998.

In relation to the abuse of his two younger sisters, the juries heard that from when the defendant was around 14-years-old, he began to sneak into their bedrooms ‘three or four times a week’ to sexually abuse them, touching them inappropriately and often leaving them ‘sore and bruised’.

Judge McCormick told the court how the defendants sisters had hoped that ‘when it came to the trial, he would do the right thing and plead guilty but he allowed us to go through the trial every day for weeks’.

Similarly to the third victim, the defendant’s stance had forced them to relive their ordeals in public and be cross examined where they were ‘being made to feel like a liar at every turn’ which had added to the trauma.

The third victim, the court heard, was just a teenage girl in 1998, trying to impress the defendant who she looked up to.

Having rained down compliments on her, the defendant had called at her family home on an errand at a time when he knew her parents were out, kissing her and trying to remove her shorts.

Judge McCormick said when she told him to stop, ‘his demeanour changed immediately’ and he told her to keep quiet or ‘her father would get him shot and then he would go to prison for years’.

According to a victim impact report, the abuse has ‘blighted’ the victim’s life and she still suffers the trauma of it.

Turning to factors in sentencing, Judge McCormick said while the defendant had been a young man himself when he began abusing his sisters, that abuse had continued until he was in his early 40s adding that the abuse ‘involved three victims spanning three decades’.

There was also features of grooming and breach of trust in a case she assessed as ‘high culpability and high harm’.

Given the defendant’s continued denials, there is no remorse and no mitigation.

In addition to the jail sentences, Judge McCormick also issued a lifelong Sexual Offences Prevention Order and told the defendant he is now barred from working with children and will have to sign the police sex offender’s register for the rest of his life.