A Galway man has been jailed for the “persistent and deplorable” sexual abuse of a girl 50 years younger than him.
Sean Kinneavy (74) was also directed to pay €38,000 in compensation to cover losses suffered by the victim and her mother.
Kinneavy, of Bóthar Buí, Carraroe, Co Galway was convicted of 47 counts of sexual assault and two of rape using an object following a trial at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin.
The victim indicated she wished for Kinneavy to be named, but to maintain her anonymity.
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The offending took place on dates between January 2013 and June 2018 at locations in Co Dublin and Co Galway.
Kinneavy was aged between 62 and 67 at the time of the offending, while the victim was then aged between 10 and 15. He does not accept the verdicts of the jury and maintains his innocence.
The court heard that Kinneavy was well-known to the girl’s family and was a regular visitor to their home in Dublin. The victim told gardaí she estimated Kinneavy sexually abused her whenever he visited, around once a month.
The abuse included inappropriate touching and digital penetration of her vagina and anus.
She said he described the touching as “massages” and that he told her to rub her ear as a code if she wanted a massage and they were around other people.
Kinneavy also sexually abused the girl and raped her twice using sex toys at his home in Galway during the summer of 2017 while she was staying there.
On one occasion, Kinneavy’s wife saw him coming out of the girl’s bedroom, and he told her he’d been watching the child use her iPad.
The abuse came to light in 2020 when the girl’s mother found a note which referred to it while the victim was hospitalised for mental health difficulties.
Imposing sentence on Monday, Mr Justice David Keane said the aggravating factors include the breach of trust and the impact on the injured party, who was then a “vulnerable child”.
He said the rape offences took place “against a background of persistent offending over a protracted period of time”. The judge said these were “persistent deplorable crimes” against a child by an adult in a position of trust.
Mr Justice Keane said the use of a code gesture “suggests a degree of a cynical planning” and that the offending was “very far from capitulation” to an impulse.
The judge noted that Kinneavy continues to maintain his innocence as is his right, but this means that no apology, expression of remorse or efforts to rehabilitate have taken place.
He said the mitigation taken into account by the court was Kinneavy’s age and his previous good character.
Mr Justice Keane said the court had considered seven testimonials submitted on behalf of Kinneavy, but that these “carry little weight in the circumstances of this case”.
He said Kinneavy’s offending were “not isolated incidents which might be said to be out of character”, but involved multiple offences repeated over several years.
He said Kinneavy was “exploiting his outward respectability to satisfy his predilections”.
The judge noted that Kinneavy is assessed at low to medium risk of reoffending by the Probation Services.
Mr Justice Keane imposed a sentence of nine years on Kinneavy in relation to the rape offences and a concurrent eight-year sentence for the sexual assaults, backdating the sentence to November last when Kinneavy went into custody.
He also imposed a two-year post-release supervision order.
In a victim impact statement read to the court by Jane Murphy BL, prosecuting, the victim said the impact of Kinneavy’s offending on her was “immeasurable” and described how her childhood was “shattered”.
She said she “lost her spark”, became a shell of herself and felt unsafe at home. She noted she will never know the life she “could and should have had” if the abuse had not occurred.
She said her family “trusted Sean implicitly”, but he left a “path of destruction” in their lives.
In her victim impact statement, the injured party said her mother took time off work between 2020 and 2021 to care for her and as a result, the family lost around €24,000 in income.
She said her family’s finances had been drained and she carried a “financial burden that someone my age should not have to carry, especially at the hands of someone else”.
