Mass card seller jailed on child porn charge

A BUSINESSMAN who ran a Longford-based company selling Mass cards has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after being unanimously convicted of two counts of possessing child pornography.

Judge Michael White told the accused, Thomas McNally (51), of Foynes Court, Longford, who had advanced colon cancer and faces a serious risk of the cancer recurring, he would have imposed a three-year sentence if not for McNally’s medical condition and long-term prognosis.

Sligo Circuit Court heard 676 images of child pornography, which had been downloaded on to A4 sheets, were discovered by investigating gardaí at two locations – 350 of them in a field outside Longford where a safe stolen from the home of the accused had been dumped, and the remainder in a large shopping bag in the boot of a car owned by the defendant’s daughter and parked in the driveway of his home.

Last April, a jury sitting at Longford Circuit Court unanimously found McNally guilty on two charges of unlawfully possessing child pornography under the 1998 Child Trafficking and Pornography Act, on February 6th and 7th, 2006.

At yesterday’s sentencing hearing in Sligo, the judge told the accused when adults used children for their sexual gratification by viewing images on a computer or via downloaded images, it meant children had been degraded and their innocence destroyed.

The court had heard evidence there was handwriting on all of the images, and that some featured the handwriting of two individuals.

The judge said he had no doubt McNally had shared the images with his daughter and this would, even in the case of an adult child, be considered a breach of trust in all civilised society.

Insp Daniel Sweeney told the hearing some of the A4 sheets had notes saying “To Dad, thanks for the pics”. Analysis by an expert had established beyond doubt that it was the defendant’s handwriting on some sheets.

During the trial it emerged the accused had reported that passports belonging to himself and his daughter had been mislaid, but he had not reported the theft of his safe to gardaí even though it contained over €21,000 in cash, as well as some jewellery. The discovery of the safe and the hundreds of images strewn around the field by the landowner’s son had sparked the investigation.

McNally told gardaí that on the night of the theft his daughter, Tanya Mulryan, revealed there had been material of a “sexual nature” stolen and he did not report the matter because he did not want to embarrass her.

Senior counsel Pádraig Dwyer, for McNally, asked the court to consider the “social opprobrium” experienced by the accused since his conviction. He had received a lot of media attention and had to remove himself from the daily running of the Mass card operation his father had established.