"Justice Was Done and a Just Sentence Served"

Enniscorthy Guardian
February 14, 2012

http://www.enniscorthyguardian.ie/news/justice-was-done-and-a-just-sentence-served-3018913.html


A FORMER priest who abused a student cleric at St. Peter's College seminary in Wexford and was labelled a 'sexual predator' by the judge at his trial, was jailed for ten years at Belfast Crown Court on Friday.

In sentencing 53-year-old James Martin Donaghy, Judge Patrick Lynch said that his litany of offences and other similar offences had 'seriously compromised, perhaps irrevocably' the trust in the priesthood in this country and others.

Donaghy, of Lady Wallace Drive in Lisburn, had been convicted by a jury of of a total of 23 sex offences, committed over a 17year time span against three victims who were all teenagers when the abuse first began.

During the five-week trial, the three victims - Father Patrick Mccafferty, James Doherty, and a third man who cannot be identified for legal reasons - all gave evidence against the 'domineering and controlling' priest who subjected them to bouts of distressing abuse.

On Friday, Judge Lynch said Donaghy had left them all with emotional scars and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Fr. Mccafferty, who was first targeted by Donaghy when he was a trainee at the seminary in St. Peter's College, said he had felt no sense of victory after Donaghy was sentenced on Friday.

' There's deep sadness and I believe justice was done and a just sentence has been served,' he said. 'What I hope for now is a new day, a new dawn. I will not be defined by this. I am far more than this.'

Fr. Mccafferty, who also suffered abuse at the hands of Donaghy in his own family home in Lisburn the night before they went to Donegal on retreat, said the trauma of what he went through was ' horrendous'.

'It was worse than my mother's death three years ago almost,' Fr Mccafferty said. '(I was) physically sick during it at times.

' There was no-one that I could have turned to in those days. I was a small, skinny fellow - eight and a half stone, looking much much younger than my years, trying to fight off a violent sexual predator. I was extremely private about myself and these violations literally blew my mind and to survive them I blocked them out.'

As well as the ten-year jail term, the judge ordered that James Martin Donaghy remains on the police sex offenders register for the rest of his life. He also imposed a 15year Sexual Offences Prevention Order, barring the paedophile from being alone with children, working with children, or living in accommodation without approval.