A FATHER of two has been jailed for five years after he pleaded guilty to stealing more than €200,000 in deposits paid by students at 26 secondary schools in Cork city and county for their graduation and debutante dances.
The judge said it was a particularly mean crime against young people at a vulnerable time in their lives.
Patrick Brown (33), Inchirahily, Crookstown, Co Cork, stole the money over a 13-month period to feed his gambling addiction, Cork Circuit Criminal Court heard yesterday.
Det Garda Michael Horgan of the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation said that Brown had a successful business organising dinner dances for sixth-year graduates and debutantes, and was organising 26 dances for schools in August and September 2007.
He began collecting deposits from students in May 2006 which he was to use to book hotels and music acts, but he failed to do so. When some parents checked in June 2007 with one of the hotels and discovered they had received no money, gardaí were alerted.
Brown had dealt directly with class reps in each of the 26 schools, said Det Garda Horgan, adding that he co-operated fully with gardaí and told them that he had spent the money on gambling.
Det Garda Horgan told Tom Creed SC, defending, that it would have been a lengthy and complicated case to prosecute, with 48 witnesses. Brown had saved the State some effort by pleading guilty to 37 of the 77 charges.
Det Garda Horgan accepted that Brown had attempted to get a job to pay back the money, but was unable to do so because of the publicity the case had received. He said all that had been recovered was €1,100, and the remaining €203,817 would not be recovered.
He also accepted that Brown came from a decent family and had no previous convictions.
Mr Creed said his client had lost his good name and besmirched his family’s good name to end up in a situation where he was now “nothing but a common criminal”. He asked Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin to be as lenient as possible.
Judge Ó Donnabháin said Brown had engaged in “the planned and determined extraction of money” from young people.
Judge Ó Donnabháin noted that the penalty for the offence was 10 years, and had Brown been convicted after a trial he would have imposed a sentence of seven to eight years.
However, because he had pleaded guilty, he believed a five-year sentence was appropriate.