Sir, - Some of the comments made recently by Judge Keane, when the Court of Criminal Appeal drastically reduced a sentence on the sexual abuser of a child, appear to defy logic. In effect, he said that the offences, committed during the 1980s, did not warrant the same degree of opprobrium or the same level of punishment as similar offences committed in more recent times.
If the judge were referring to some breach of a government regulation or some offence not involving violence against the individual, there might perhaps' be circumstances in which such an approach could be justified. But the crime in this instance involved a series of sexual assaults, over a period of year, on a defenceless child.
I would have thought that in whatever year, in whatever era, it was perpetrated, such a crime should be seen as an enormity and should be punished as such.
-Yours, etc.,
Chairman of the Board of the
Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and of the Council of
Barnardos,
Parkmore Drive,
Terenure,
Dublin 6W.