Barman who sexually assaulted girl can walk free
Attacker groomed his victim online
A BARMAN who sexually assaulted a girl after grooming her online has had a tenmonth jail sentence suspended on appeal.
In November 2012, Owen O’Donoghue pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the 14-yearold girl.
The 39- year- old received ten months in jail, with six of these months suspended.
His entire sentence was suspended last week after he appealed at Limerick Circuit Court. The reduced sentence is subject to his good behaviour for two years.
The court previously heard O’Donoghue groomed the terrified girl and sent her explicit messages on Facebook.
He then struck his young victim when he fondled and kissed her on the back of her neck in his home on June 10, 2011.
The girl’s mother told the court, that following the assault, her daughter had lost friends and suffered from nightmares and flashbacks of the attack.
An offer of compensation was rejected by the girl.
‘The nightmares are unreal. She says she can still hear him breathing down her neck. How could a man do this to a child,’ the victim’s
‘The nightmares are unreal’
mother said. Judge Eugene O’Kelly said it was an ‘ extremely serious breach of trust’.
Solicitor Chris Lynch, said his client was ‘at a loss to explain his loss of control’.
He said O’Donoghue was unemployed, but was ‘ very highly thought of in the bar trade’.
The attack came to light when the victim’s sister noticed sexual remarks left by O’Donoghue for the girl on Facebook.
Judge O’Kelly told O’Donoghue: ‘ It seems i t was more than a momentary lapse.’
‘ The content was extremely graphic and so explicit that [the girl] wasn’t able to understand some of it,’ Judge O’Kelly said.
The content was not described in court.
‘ Gardaí believed that Mr O’Donoghue was grooming this young girl and so it puts it in the more serious scale.
‘Had it not been detected [on Facebook], it’s very difficult to comprehend what might have transpired,’ the judge added.
During sentencing Judge O’Kelly noted that O’Donoghue had ‘ not forced the girl to give evidence’ by pleading guilty, and that he had no convictions.
Outside the court the girl’s mother said: ‘This is not justice. I can’t understand this system, I honestly can’t.’ The girl waived her right to anonymity, which allowed Mr O’Donoghue’s name to be made public.
At his appeal hearing l ast week, Judge Carroll Moran said he had to factor in O’Donoghue’s previous good record, his admissions of guilt, and the ‘fact that he will suffer considerable punishment anyway by way of social disgrace’.
Solicitor Michael Murray told the court that the sexual assault had taken place at O’Donoghue’s home on June 10, 2011, shortly after he had sent other youths in the house to the shop.
The sexual assault i nvolved O’Donoghue inappropriately touching the girl’s thighs and waist, trying to kiss her, and sitting her on his lap.
Murray said O’Donoghue had used ‘classic grooming tactics’ by sending the girl sex messages on Facebook and on her mobile phone.
The girl told gardaí, she had received a mess age from O’Donoghue that she ‘would have to be spanked’.
Another of the messages he sent read: ‘I need a bit of excitement.’ The teenage girl told gardaí that O’Donoghue would touch other girls in her circle of friends ‘on the bum’, and ‘would give us hugs and call us names like “Baby Bops”’.
She said that she began to avoid O’Donoghue whenever she saw him.
The girl’s mother said that her daughter had ‘lost her innocence’ after the attack.
Mr Murray told Judge Moran the explicit messages were ‘sinister’.
Dr John Bogue, a forensic psychologist, appeared as an expert
‘Call us names like “Baby Bops”’
witness for the defence.
He said from his first interaction with the accused, O’Donoghue knew ‘what he did was 100 per cent wrong and was not a trivial offence’.
Dr Bogue believed it was significant that having been made aware of the criminal proceedings, the HSE had not sought to impose restrictions on the access O’Donoghue, who is separated, had to his three teenage children.
Dr Bogue s ai d t hat s i nce O’Donoghue’s original conviction, he had been abused in the street, and his car had been attacked.
He said that as O’Donoghue was also in a stable intimate relationship with a mature female, it would indicate ‘ he had no entrenched paedophilic interests’.
Mr Murray said he had instructions that O’Donoghue was not, in fact, in any relationship.
Judge Moran said that the ‘premature sexualisation of young teenager’”, as evident in O’Donoghue’s behaviour, was ‘quite wrong’.
However, he ruled it would be just in the circumstances to suspend the entirety of the sentence for two years, on condition that O’Donoghue, with an address at Fairgreen, Garryowen, Co. Limerick, have no unsupervised contact with any children under the age of 18 except his own.