Tag Archives: girl

Tuamgraney-born author Edna O’Brien celebrated her 90th birthday this week to huge plaudits from the global literary world. President Michael D Higgins described the novelist as one of the finest chroniclers of Irish life. Widely regarded as Ireland’s greatest living writer, Ms O’Brien marked her birthday with the delivery of the TS Eliot lecture on Eliot and James Joyce for The Abbey Theatre. The piece was recorded at the Irish Embassy in London and broadcast on Tuesday evening (December 15). Ms O’Brien’s debut novel The County Girls convulsed 1960s Ireland with its honest representation of female sexuality and small town communities. Despite the reaction, Ms O’Brien in an interview in 1970 with RTÉ expressed warm feelings fro the county. “I would not want to have come from anywhere else despite certain inconveniences which I haven’t omitted to remember,” she said. In more recent years, The Country Girls trilogy has taken its rightful place in the canon of 20th century Irish …

A Clare man has received a sentence of three years imprisonment for the sexual assault of an eight-year-old girl during a sleep over. The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is already serving a term of 15 years imprisonment for the abuse of a female relative. In that case he began regularly raping the child in his own flat from when she was aged nine. Last month the 49-year-old was convicted by a jury after a trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court of the sexual assault of a girl during a sleepover with other children at his home on November 11, 2005. He had denied the charge. On Friday last, Keith Spencer BL, defending, told Judge Patricia Ryan that the man did not accept the verdict of the jury and would appeal the conviction. The man has 41 previous convictions, which include the convictions of sexual assault and rape from the Central Criminal Court earlier this year. The …

By Aoife Nic Ardghail A TWO and a half years in prison sentence has been imposed on a Clare man for sexually assaulting a then eight-year-old girl in her home. The 53-year-old man pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to sexually assaulting the girl by touching her private parts on November 23, 2009. He has no previous convictions. Judge Mary Ellen Ring said although the man had pleaded guilty, she was concerned that he had not fully accepted the implications of what he had done. An investigating garda revealed that the little girl had been watching TV when the man came into the room and lay down beside her on the sofa. The girl told gardaí the man had touched her chest area and private parts and asked her if she wanted to see his penis. The girl said “no” and nothing else happened. The garda told Tara Burns SC, prosecuting, that the girl complained to her mother after …