{"id":156181,"date":"2025-10-31T23:51:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T23:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/156181\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T23:51:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T23:51:08","slug":"monster-sex-abuser-whose-abuse-spanned-three-decades-jailed-for-20-years-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/156181\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Monster\u2019 sex abuser whose abuse spanned three decades jailed for 20 years \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">A \u201cmonster\u201d whose sexual abuse of four victims spanned three decades has been jailed for 20 years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Declan Daly (54) of Cassidy Apartments, Kells, Co <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/meath\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/meath\">Meath<\/a>, pleaded guilty before his trial to 12 counts of sexual assault and indecent assault against three women victims on dates between 1982 and 2002. He was convicted at trial of three counts of raping a further victim in 2022.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Carl Hanahoe SC, prosecuting, told the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/central-criminal-court\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/central-criminal-court\/\">Central Criminal Court<\/a> that the women wished to retain their anonymity, but have no difficulty with Daly being identified in reporting of the case.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The court heard the later rapes occurred after the victim told him that she had been sexually abused by another man. The totality of the offending against all the women came to light when this last victim disclosed the abuse she suffered at the hands of both men.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The second abuser of this victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has already been dealt with by the courts and jailed for 13 years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">This woman urged others not to be afraid to come forward and tell someone what was happening to them, in her victim impact statement to the court.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Mr Justice Patrick McGrath said it did no justice to the horror perpetrated by Daly on the women to say the victim impact statements were harrowing. He said he hoped the victims would be able to move on with their lives and lay the blame on Daly who is solely responsible for the offending.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">He said Daly had taken advantage of the final victim, who suffered the most serious abuse, in a \u201cmost sinister and savage way\u201d and was aware she had been exposed to similar offending at the hands of another abuser.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">He said the offending against this victim was in the highest category meriting 15 years to life imprisonment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Mr Justice McGrath imposed consecutive sentences totalling 22 years imprisonment and suspended the final two years of the sentence for five years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The four women each read their victim impact statement to the court during an earlier sentence hearing. They described the long lasting effects of the abuse on them including feelings of shame, low self worth, upset and anger.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">One complainant said Daly was a \u201cmonster\u201d, a \u201csick, sick man\u201d and \u201cdisgusting\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">\u201cYou are nothing but a coward. You ducked and dived all your life, but the jury saw through you. You are the abuser, you are the rapist,\u201d she said<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Another told the court she is slowly rebuilding her life and wants closure on this \u201cawful part\u201d of it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The court heard Daly had cruelly silenced one victim with threats against beloved animals.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The investigating garda agreed with Dean Kelly SC, defending, that Daly has a long work history. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Mr Kelly told the court his client accepts the verdicts of the jury. Counsel said he was instructed to apologise to the victims, though it is accepted this may be of little comfort.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Mr Kelly asked the court to take into account that his client was a teenager for some of the offending, and that his client has a small number of previous convictions, primarily for road traffic offences.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Counsel submitted that Daly\u2019s offending took place in two distinct phases, separated by a long period of time, acknowledging that the second tranche of offending is extremely serious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A \u201cmonster\u201d whose sexual abuse of four victims spanned three decades has been jailed for 20 years. Declan&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[9,10,65264,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,1873,5,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-156181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-central-criminal-court","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-latestnews","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-meath","22":"tag-news","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}