A man was convicted yesterday at Galway Circuit Court of harassing a Co Galway primary teacher and her mother over a three-year period.
Selliah Ramachchandran (40), an Irish citizen, from Orpen Close, Stillorgan, Co Dublin, denied he had harassed Ms Geraldine Fahy and her mother, Mrs Maura Fahy, from Rathbane, Ardrahan, by persistently communicating with them.
During the four-day trial it emerged that Ms Fahy had had to go to Australia to get away from the unwanted attention of the accused, who sent her and her mother numerous "nasty, perverse" letters, poems and books between 1995 and 1997.
The jury of nine women and three men took just 40 minutes to find the accused guilty on two counts of harassment on the first ever case of its type to be taken on indictment in the Circuit Court.
Judge Harvey Kenny deferred sentencing to the April sitting of Galway Circuit Court and denied an application for bail. Judge Kenny ordered a probation report to be furnished at the next sitting of the Circuit Court.
The jury was told how Ms Fahy had turned from being an outgoing, happy-go-lucky person into one who had become nervous, jumpy and afraid to go out alone.
A State prosecutor, Mr Conor Fahy, said the accused first met Ms Fahy and her sister, Helen, when they started working as waitresses in the Shama Restaurant, Galway, in August 1994. At the time the accused worked as a chef there.
He started giving the girls presents which they did not want and he used to stare at them. He kept asking them out but they always refused. They became "unnerved" by his unwanted attention. At Christmas 1994 he tried to give Geraldine a candlestick which symbolised the children they would have together. She refused the gift and left her job immediately.
"I never had a relationship with him. I never wanted his presence and I just wanted him to leave me alone," said Geraldine Fahy.
Ramachchandran then started writing disturbing letters to Geraldine in January 1995. He left two books and a letter at her bedsit in Galway. When she found them she mistakenly thought he had broken into her flat. She reported the matter to gardai but later discovered he had given the books to her landlady who had left them in her flat. Ramachchandran became upset when gardai contacted him, and after that his letters to Geraldine became more "nasty and perverse".