A mother who enabled the rape of her nearly 6-yr-old daughter by the child’s uncle has received a 15 year prison sentence at the Central Criminal Court.
The woman received an additional five-year term for each of two counts of sexually assaulting the child at age four, to run concurrently with the main sentence, reports RTE.
Her brother, the child’s uncle, was also sentenced for raping the girl after his sister led him into a bedroom where the child was lying on the bed watching television, reports RTE.
The court was told that the woman stayed in the room throughout the rape and then afterwards picked up her daughter from the bed and carried her back to her own bed in a separate room.
The sexual assault offences took place at various times between January and September 2001, while the rape offence, along with the facilitation of the rape, occurred in March 2003.
The woman, now aged 52, was found guilty by a Central Criminal Court jury last July after an 18-day trial.
Both she and the child’s uncle continued to assert their innocence and did not accept the jury’s verdict.
Ms Justice Eileen Creedon described the crimes as an abuse of trust of the most depraved kind, carried out by the child’s biological mother and uncle for their own sexual gratification, reports RTE.
The two sexual assault incidents happened at an even earlier stage when the child was only four years old.
In her victim impact statement delivered last October, the woman, now in her 20s, explained that she had grown up in an abusive and chaotic household where she was never protected from harm, feeling used, abandoned and betrayed, reports RTE.
She continues to experience PTSD and intense anxiety, but in October she described herself as now a survivor.
She stated that telling the truth saves you and others, and the cycle has now been broken, reports RTE.
The judge today praised her remarkable courage, including enduring the entire trial process.
She noted that her uncle, now 46, had also refused to accept the jury’s verdict, and the victim had received no apology from him, reports RTE.
The judge observed that as a child she should have been cared for and protected, but instead she endured cruel and depraved treatment.
She indicated that the headline sentence for this case in respect of both offenders was 16 years, taking into account that neither had acknowledged the severe trauma inflicted on the victim, reports RTE.
However, she pointed out that the mother had no previous convictions and the uncle had no prior convictions relevant to this matter.
She imposed a 15-year custodial sentence on both, backdated to July 2025 for the mother and to November 2024 for the uncle, reports RTE.
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