Warning: This report contains details which some readers may find upsetting.

A FATHER-OF-FIVE who raped his partner’s six-month old niece and made videos of it will be sentenced by the Central Criminal Court next week.

The 58-year-old Tipperary man also produced sexually explicit images of four other children who were between the ages of five and 12 years-old at the time.

The 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.

A local detective told counsel for the prosecution, Sean Gillane, that investigators became aware of the allegations after an anonymous envelope was delivered to a garda station on 14 August, 2019, which contained an SD memory card and a handwritten note.

The handwritten note outlined that the memory card contained a clip of an infant being sexually abused by the accused man, and asked gardaí to arrest “this monster”.

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 with their genitals were exposed.

The defendant could be seen coming into the bathroom and fixing the position of the camera in a majority of the clips.

The court heard that the accused man was in a relationship with a woman since 2012, and that 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.

The witness said that three explicit video files had shown the defendant performing sex acts involving the six-month old child.

The baby could be heard in distress in the videos, a 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 sex abuse images of the baby and the four older children.

He further pleaded guilty to four counts of possession of child sex abuse images  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.

Counsel for the defendant Coleman Cody accepted that the level of criminality was impossible to comprehend, and that aggravating factors included the disparity in ages between the man and his 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”.

Cody said that his client had became addicted to cocaine and it had become a destabilising factor in his life.

He added that the accused accepted that he would receive a serious custodial sentence for the offences.

Mr Justice Alexander Owens remanded the man in custody until 26 February, when he will be sentenced.

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