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	Dublin Priest Convicted of 30-year-old Sex Assaults Breaking News November 1, 2010 http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/dublin-priest-convicted-of-30-year-old-sex-assaults-480009.html A Dublin priest has been convicted of buggering and sexually abusing a boy almost 30 years ago. The jury of seven men and five women returned verdicts of guilty on nine counts of indecent assault and five counts of buggery on the boy between June 1, 1979 and June 30, 1983. They had been deliberating for one hour and 34 minutes on day four of the trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. The victim was aged between seven and 11 years old at the time of the offences. The 54-year-old accused, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was earlier found not guilty by direction of the trial judge on one count each of indecent assault and buggery in the Phoenix Park on February 18, 1980. Judge Frank O’Donnell thanked the jury for their care and attention throughout the duration of the trial. He remanded the accused in custody to set a sentence date later. The complainant, who is now 38, told Ms Mary Rose Gearty SC, prosecuting, that he met the accused when he was around seven years old while a pupil at a Dublin national school. “My first ever conversation with him was when my dad, who was an alcoholic, had beaten my mother up and I got a grazed lip and a bruise on my cheek as my dad hit me too,” the complainant said. “It was raining that day when I went to school and I was in the sheds at lunch time when he (the defendant) came over to me and saw my bruises and asked me what had happened.” “He hugged and cuddled me and then asked me was I interested in becoming an alter boy, which I agreed to become,” said the complainant. “The first time he brought me into the presbytery after I was serving Mass he sat on an armchair and he sat me on his knee to talk about my mam and dad,” the complainant told Ms Gearty. “He would rock me up and down to the music and would (touch me intimately),” he said. “Then he would give me lemonade, crisps and chocolate.” He told Ms Gearty he was first raped by the defendant in the presbytery when he was 10 years old during a school sports day. He said the defendant asked him to bend over a coffee table and tied his wrists and ankles with vestment ropes before molesting and raping him. “I started crying and he...closed the open window and kept telling me he loved me and he would protect me and that everything would be okay.” The defendant told Ms Gearty he had received counselling in his later years and was hospitalised a number of times.
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