A man has been found guiltyof 23 charges involving the defilement of an underage teenage girl at Galway Circuit Court .
The Dubliner bragged to another man that he was having sex with a 15-year-old schoolgirl while showing him pictures of her in scantily-clad poses which he had taken on his phone.
The man in his 50s, also showed the man a very short white mini-shirt, bragging the girl wore if for him every time he had sex with her.
The man began to cry when unanimously found guilty by a jury at Galway Circuit Court on Thursday of 23 charges involving the defilement of a child aged under 17 years of age, and a further eight charges of defilement by getting the girl to perform oral sex on him on numerous dates over an 18-month period, between 2009 and 2010.
He was remanded in custody to November 29th for sentence.
The two-week trial heard the man first met the girl when he dropped his then 15-year-old son off for his first date with her on St Patricks Day 2009. Her mother had bought her a very short, white mini skirt which she wore on the date, the court heard.
The then 42-year-old began texting the girl shortly after that and began driving her two to three times a week to remote wooded and boggy locations in Connemara to defile her.
He told her he liked her in the miniskirt when he saw her that first day and asked if he could have it. She gave it to him on one of their trips to Connemara, and he got her to wear it every time he abused her after that. He kept the skirt and washed it when it got stained, the trial heard.
On one trip to Connemara in 2010, when the girl was 16,the man took pictures of her scantily-clad body, draped across the bonnet of his car. He also took pictures of her lying topless in the grass and another of her in her bra, standing near a reek of turf. There were others where he got her to pose suggestively with her hands under her clothing.
The court heard he also had defiled her regularly in his own home and had supplied her with cigarettes and alcohol.
In his closing speech to the jury on Thursday, Mr Conor Fahy BL, prosecuting described the photos as “sad” as they depicted a young vulnerable, child being exploited by a man for his own sexual gratification.
When asked on the first day of the trial last week what had she to say, looking back now the woman replied:
“I don’t know what to say. It wasn’t right, but I couldn’t give up the attention and looking-after that I had from him and it just kills me now to think of it.” She became upset at one point while telling jurors: “We had sex two to three times a week from April 2009, up until I was 17.”