A retired computer expert from Shankill, County Dublin has been sentenced to three years in jail after Gardaí discovered over 55,000 videos and images of child sexual abuse on four devices belonging to him.
Niall Syms (70) of Hazelwood Park Shankill appeared before the Circuit Criminal Court where he was charged in relation to possession and distribution of the unlawful images, one of which was a video of a female child aged between 7 and 9 years being vaginally, anally, and digitally raped by an adult male while tied up.
The court heard that the distribution count related to the use of a Torrent website where material downloaded by Syms would have been uploaded simultaneously.
While Syms initially did not enter a guilty plea in respect of the count of distribution, investigating Gardaí said that due to his level of expertise with computers, he would have been aware of this.
The court heard that Garda Joanna Doyle was contacted by an international child protection agency and given information that child sex abuse images were being accessed by an IP address associated with the accused.
When Gardaí executed a search warrant of the Shankill address that the accused shared with his wife and son at the time, they seized quite a number of devices, before subsequent analysis revealed the presence of the offending material on four of these.
When officers executing the search warrant asked Syms if he had ever accessed child sex abuse imagery he said he had “rarely” done so.
Detective Garda Alan O’Neill of the National Cyber Crime Unit discovered “quite a number of files” which contained 55,945 images and videos of child sex abuse.
53,890 images and 2,055 videos were discovered across the devices. The court heard that the first device contained 51 images of child exposure and 940 of child sexual exploitation.
The second device contained 308 images of child exposure and 11 of child sexual exposure, the third device contained 44,320 images of child exposure and 10,143 images of child sexual exploitation.
The fourth device contained 84 images of child exposure and 74 images of child sexual exploitation.
Links were found which Garda O’Neill said had “very suggestive titles indicative of child abuse material” which were “easily accessible” which showed “serious sexual abuse” of children as young as four years of age.
Syms, who has no previous convictions, has a “very extensive work history” at a data processing company and has worked as a data line controller, before retiring some years ago, the court heard.
His defending counsel argued that Syms has undergone extensive therapy since the discovery of the material and that he now has no contact with his family “as a result of his actions”.
Syms claims that he developed an interest in the sexual abuse of children due to “progressive deterioration in his marriage”, “isolation”, and “emotional distance”.
The court heard that the maximum sentence for possession of child sex abuse images is five years, while the maximum sentence for distributions is 14 years.
Judge Orla Crowe expressed the court’s regard to the “sheer volume” of images involved and the age of the victims.
She said that the material involved was “repugnant”, saying that the accused’s claim to have only accessed it “rarely” was belied by the number of images he had on his devices.
The court set a headline sentence of four years in respect of the offending which was reduced to an effective sentence of three years which us to be backdated to the 23rd of January to give credit for a period of custodial remand.