A man who bought more than 500 images of child pornography on the Internet has been fined €1,000 and given a two year suspended sentence by Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
Colum MacCormack (36), St Brigid's Crescent, Artane, pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography at his home on March 16th, 2003.
Gardaí working under Operation Amethyst found 539 images of child pornography on the hard drive of his laptop computer in his bedroom. All but two of the images had also been copied on to a CD-Rom.
Det Garda Martin Hogan, who examined the images, told Mr Justin Dillon, prosecuting, that the images included those of children posing or exposed in the nude and of children engaged in sexual acts. None were video clips or depicted violence.
Mr Luan Ó Braonáin, for MacCormack, told Judge Desmond Hogan that his client had no previous convictions and was attending the Granada Institute for therapy.
Mr Ó Braonáin also noted that MacCormack had not been involved in distributing the images. His client had engaged in one transaction with the website from which he had purchased the images and had not been "actively involved in consistently accessing child pornography".
Judge Hogan noted that strictly within the context of the seriousness of the crime and compared with other such cases which had come before him, MacCormack's offences were "at the lower end of the scale".
He gave liberty to the chief investigating officer, Det Garda James Duffy, to re-enter the case should MacCormack discontinue attendance at the Granada Institute without its authorisation.