A MAN has been sentenced to three years in prison with two years of the jail term suspended for possession of pornography showing “the systematic rape of children”.
At the Circuit Criminal Court in Dublin, Mario Steffen (29), who worked in a hotel in Cavan town and then lived in Duleek, Co Meath, downloaded thousands of offensive images and films from an internet file-sharing site over a six-month period.
Steffen is a trained chef who came to Ireland to work in the hospitality industry. He pleaded guilty to having child pornography on June 25th, 2007, at his home at Templeroan Grove, Knocklyon, Dublin.
Judge Frank O’Donnell adjourned sentencing last April and further remanded Steffen in custody following an application from defence counsel Michael Bowman, to allow them to investigate what therapy or treatment would be available to him in Germany in his native language.
Steffen, originally from Gorki Street, Lawnhaamer, Germany, was declared a sex offender at an earlier hearing.
Karen O’Connor, prosecuting, told Judge O’Donnell that the maximum prison term was five years.
Judge O’Donnell suspended the last two years of the sentence and backdated it to the day Steffen went into custody in June 2007 on condition that he take up a place in a treatment centre in Germany.
He said because he could not order Steffen to return to Germany, he made it a condition of his bond that if he remained in Ireland he must liaise with the Probation Service for two years and carry out any treatment courses recommended by it.
Judge O’Donnell described the material Steffen downloaded as “pretty horrific” and said the offence was closer to the “upper end of the scale”. He noted that Steffen was sharing a house with two people at the time and complimented them for their “brave decision” in contacting gardaí when they saw what he had downloaded.
He said the housemates’ conduct “was not the kind seen often enough from law-abiding citizens”.
Garda Terry Brosnan told Ms O’Connor that child pornography was found on hundreds of CDs as well as 3,895 images and 1,544 film files on Steffen’s laptop and two hard drives after two of his housemates became suspicious of material on his computer and went to gardaí.
Garda Brosnan said child pornographic material was rated in five categories: level five being legal and the least offensive, showing sexualised behaviour from clothed children, to level one depicting pain or involving animals. He said an “enormous amount of material” in this case fell into categories two to four and depicted children aged from one year or younger to children in their early teens.
Steffen was arrested at his workplace and made immediate admissions. He told gardaí that he had become interested in looking at the images in 2006 and had been the only person to use the seized computer. He said he did not take any pictures and was only interested in watching rather than in taking part.
Garda Brosnan said Steffen had had an “illness” because he had sought out material depicting “the systematic rape of children”.
Mr Bowman said Steffen had not paid for any of the images but had downloaded them for free from an internet-based file-sharing site. He said he had not made, disseminated or profited from any of the material.
He had trained as a chef in Germany before completing his military service in Kosovo where he had “seen some traumatic sights”.