Taoiseach Simon Harris has described the crimes of Alexander McCartney as “depraved and haunting” while also paying tribute to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) for bringing the Co Armagh man to justice.
On Friday McCartney, whose online catfishing caused the death of a 12-year-old girl in the United States, was sentenced to life with a minimum of 20 years.
Mr Harris said the case highlighted the need for further cross-Border co-operation in tackling such “horrific, disgusting and despicable” crimes and he called on the European Union to quickly pass a directive on tackling child abuse.
At the sentencing hearing of the 26-year-old from Lissummon Road in Newry for a total of 185 charges including manslaughter, Mr Justice O’Hara said “he used social media on an industrial scale to inflict such terrible and catastrophic damage on young girls”.
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The PSNI has said it believes there may be as many as 3,500 victims worldwide.
The offences admitted by McCartney include the manslaughter of 12-year-old Cimarron Thomas from West Virginia who took her own life in May 2018 after she was targeted on Snapchat.
Her father Ben Thomas, a US army veteran, took his own life 18 months later.
Mr Harris told reporters on Saturday that he wanted to “pay tribute to the incredible work that’s been done by the PSNI in terms of international collaboration with other police forces ... when it comes to the most horrific disgusting despicable crimes against children.”
Mr Harris said it was “one of the most depraved and haunting cases that I think I think we’ve ever heard of ... [and] does definitely show the need now for the European Union to get on with it when it comes to passing a directive on child sex abuse.”
He said Minister for Justice Helen McEntee had led on this at the European level and added that while “privacy rights matter, what matters most is keeping our children safe and the fact that there are many apps today that exist that are fully encrypted that therefore it is not possible in the way that it should be for children’s protection and wellbeing to be as high up that agenda as it needs to be”.
He said this was “not a situation that can be tolerated so we will continue to renew our efforts at a European level as the new EU Commission takes hold to see a European-wide directive when it comes to child sex abuse”.
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