A MAN from Dublin has gone on trial at the Central Criminal Court accused of raping, sexually assaulting and physically assaulting his daughter over a 10-year period. He has pleaded not guilty to 41 counts of anal rape, 41 counts of oral rape and 24 counts of sexual assault between July 1996 and March 2006.
He has also pleaded not guilty to four counts of assaulting the girl causing her harm by striking her with a knife, striking her with a hatchet, burning her back with a cigarette and kicking her between August 2003 and April 2004.
He denies two counts of intentionally or recklessly causing the girl serious harm by smashing an ashtray and forcing her to kneel on broken glass, and by scalding her, between August 2003 and April 2004. He also denies two counts of making threats to kill or cause serious harm to her between November 2006 and September 2007.
On the first day of the trial, the now 21-year-old daughter told Aileen Donnelly, prosecuting, that when she was seven years old she came to Dublin with her mother to meet her father for the first time in July 1996. On the day she met her father, she said he stayed the night with her and her mother in a Dublin city BB, where they all shared a double bed, with her mother sleeping in the middle.
“During that first night I felt a rough, big hand down below in my vagina. I knew it wasn’t my mother’s hand as she has small, gentle hands,” the daughter said.
She said within a few weeks they had moved into an apartment and the sexual assaults continued when her father made her give him oral sex when her mother was not in the house. By 1999, the girl, her siblings and her parents had moved to another Dublin estate, where, she said, the abuse continued.
In 2001 she said her parents split up and her mother initially looked after her and her siblings, but after a while, due to complications, her mother moved out and her father took over minding all three of them in the same house.
The daughter told Ms Donnelly her two other siblings were in one bedroom and she had to share a double bed with her father.
She gave evidence that on her 15th birthday in 2003, her father went to the pub with his friends and sexually assaulted her when he returned. She gave evidence that he lit a cigarette and used her as a human ashtray by stubbing the cigarette out on the tops of her shoulders and in her lower back.
She said he smashed a glass ashtray and made her kneel in the glass and clean it up with her hands. She showed the jury scars on each knee she claims she got from the glass.
The trial continues before Mr Justice Barry White.