A PROLIFIC SEXUAL offender has been sentenced to nine months imprisonment and has been banned from being near schools and other locations where children congregate. 

Anthony Quigley, 51, of Roches Heights, Mitchelstown, Co Cork was before Cork Circuit Criminal Court for a number of breaches of sexual offender legislation. 

Detective Garda David Barry said that Quigley has 66 convictions for a range of offences including a number of sexual crimes, assault and harassment.

The breaches included an incident in which he approached a woman in her 60s on a street in Mitchelstown, placed his hand around her shoulder and asked her to engage in a sexual act. 

On another occasion when approached by gardaí in Cork city he gave a false name and the wrong address. People on the sex offenders register must, by law, give whatever names and aliases they use to gardaí.

The court heard from Detective Garda Barry that Quigley had failed to sign on at a garda station last year on a number of occasions.  

The court also heard from Patrick Breen, a Probation Service officer, who said that Quigley had failed to attend a number of meetings both in Cork and in Mitchelstown to discuss his case. 

Counsel for Quigley said that the failure to sign on and attend meetings was “unusual for his client”. 

The court also heard from the defence that Quigley had suffered significant injuries in a road crash when he was 17-years-old.

Judge Dermot Sheehan, in sentencing, said: “Mr Quigley doesn’t appear to understand that these are serious matters”.

“Mr Quigley well knows what he’s about here, he has a previous history, a nine-month custodial sentence is appropriate from today’s date,” he added. 

The State then made a separate civil application for a sex offenders order which would stop Quigley from being close to children, ban him from anywhere children congregate and from working with children.

The ban would also stop him from speaking to women in a sexually offensive manner and following them.

In this application the court heard that Quigley had approached women and teenage girls and boys.

The court heard that gardaí were “very concerned about his behaviour”. He followed two women who were out for a walk. 

A school principal had complained to the gardaí about his behaviour. On one occasion he asked a teenage boy to give him details of female classmate’s TikTok accounts and also asked him to ask his mother if she would have sex with him.

On another occasion he sat outside a school in the town and watched students.

The criteria for the application is that the person who would be bound by the order had been convicted of a sexual offence in the State and had acted more than once in a way that would give reasonable grounds for the gardaí to apply for the order to protect the public. 

Judge Sheehan granted the order and imposed it for 15 years on Quigley.