A Garda sergeant has been given a nine-month prison sentence for seeking sex with a 13year-old girl in a brothel. Gerard Lynch is still free, however, after bail was granted pending an appeal to the circuit court.
Judge Gerard Haughton in Richmond District Court, Dublin, yesterday said Lynch was a "competent liar" who had "brazened it out" to give the impression that he was trying to protect the kind of children on whom he was preying. Lynch was convicted last month following a three-day hearing in which he denied soliciting for the purposes of prostitution.
When he was arrested in a Limerick brothel seeking to have sex with a 13-year-old girl, he had £250 cash in his breast pocket. He was recorded talking to an undercover garda about what he would like to do to the 13year-old and how the youngest girl he would "use" was eight.
He claimed he was on a solo investigation into the disappearance of a 15-year-old girl from his local station area of Malahide.
After his father, Mr Joe Lynch, put up a £900 independent surety pending appeal, he ran from the court without comment. Just before he was sentenced, Lynch apologised "for taking up the court's time for three days" and in hindsight, he might have taken "a different course". He had sought counselling with the Granada Institute, which helps sex offenders, although they had not been able to take him on yet.
His father told the court that the affair had brought "shattering shame" to the family. Mr John Peart SC, for Lynch, asked Judge Haughton to consider a suspended sentence as this would be hanging over him "should he fall from grace again".
Judge Haughton said he could only sentence Mr Lynch for what he was convicted of, not for what he intended to do. Although this was an offence which was triable in the district court only, it was at the more serious end of the scale.
It was a "very great pity" that his plea in mitigation had not been entered at the start of the case.
"Instead of that, the accused braved it out to the last. He was a competent liar and in giving evidence was cool, calm and he was collected."
Throughout the case, he had suggested that his medication may have made him behave foolishly and irresponsibly. A report from a consultant he was seeing did not suggest that this was so.
Judge Haughton noted that while he now was apologising for taking up the court's time, he had still not directly said he was guilty. "That is the implication, but just as was your evidence twisted in the original case, your evidence today has not been straightforward."
The public, he said, was entitled to expect that the courts would take a serious view where young children were at risk.
Judge Haughton said he would impose a custodial sentence of nine months. He fixed leave to appeal in Mr Lynch's bond of £600 with an independent surety of £900.