A FORMER Garda sergeant has been jailed for six years for attempting to pay prostitutes to get him children as young as five years old for sex .
Kieran O’Halloran (48) offered two prostitutes up to €10,000 to source the children and asked one to organise “three or four children in a hotel room” for him to have sex with, a year after he had been released from prison for a similar offence.
Gardaí began investigating him after one of the prostitutes tipped them off because she was disgusted by the requests.
He pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to inciting the women to organise or knowingly facilitate the use of a child for the purpose of sexual exploitation in October 2005 and April 2006.
O’Halloran, Liffey Court, Clane, Co Kildare and Westminster Park, Foxrock, was jailed for three years in 2003 for an almost identical offence and a 20-year post-release supervision order was imposed on that occasion.
Yesterday Judge Katherine Delahunt suspended the last 15 months of the sentence on condition that he engage with the Probation Service for those 15 months on his release from prison.
She noted there was no evidence that O’Halloran had ever abused a child and accepted that he had been abused himself when he was young, had low self-esteem and had a history of depression and alcoholism.
She also noted submissions by defence counsel Luán Ó Braonáin SC that the “requests were unreal” and that O’Halloran was unemployed at the time with no chance of paying the fees he had indicated.
Mr Ó Braonáin claimed that O’Halloran had said these things to “get a reaction”.
Judge Delahunt had adjourned the case previously to establish to what extent O’Halloran had been supervised by both the Probation Service and the Granada Institute on his release from custody on the last occasion.
She said the Probation Service had been consistently proactive in its dealings with O’Halloran.
Judge Delahunt accepted that O’Halloran had attended at the Granada Institute regularly for intensive treatment but despite this he was still considered to be at a high risk of reoffending.
The Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children expressed concern last night over the “leniency” of the sentence. It said it not reflect “the severity of the crime and the total unacceptability of child sexual abuse”.