A Galway man who lured two very young girls away from a children’s birthday party and told them he would cut their parents’ throats before repeatedly raping them has received two life sentences.
The 30-year-old man lured the six and nine year old girls from a park where they were playing and repeatedly forced them both to perform sex acts with him.
During the ordeal, which lasted 20 minutes, he told them: “Do what I tell you or I will cut your parent”s throat and then cut yours.”
The girls escaped through a window in the ground floor flat and ran back to their parents who had by this stage noticed they were missing and were out looking for them.
The rapist pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to three counts of the rape, anal rape and oral rape of a nine-year-old and two counts of the oral and anal rape of the six-year-old girl at an address in Co Westmeath on September 28, 2013.
The father of the youngest victim sobbed while reading out a 10-minute victim impact statement in which he said that hearing his child first tell him what the man had done to her was “like a bomb going off in his head”.
Passing sentence on Monday Mr Justice Paul Carney said he found it too upsetting to recite the facts of the case.
He said: “A feature of this case was to observe the faces of the hard-boiled press corps having difficulty listening to the facts emerging”.
