There was a very troubling opening section in yesterday’s extensive report in the Irish Times, by David Raleigh, of the case of Timmy Duggan, the man sent to prison for seven years this week for paedophilia in County Kerry. Read it all, if you can stomach it, but this jumped out at me:
Timmy Duggan first appeared on the radar of An Garda Síochána in April 2016 after the father of two young girls, aged 11 and 12, discovered he had been sending them messages on Snapchat asking for lewd photos.
Duggan, who was working as an assistant manager in a major supermarket chain in Limerick at the time, befriended the two girls when they bought sweets in the shop and he added them as his Snapchat friends online.
After the intervention of the children’s father, Duggan voluntarily presented himself at a Limerick Garda station and surrendered his phone and laptop and social media accounts to investigators.
He initially denied asking the girls for naked photos but eventually admitted he had, and that he had sent them a photograph of himself lying on a bed naked from the waist up.
Despite handing up his mobile phone and laptop to gardaí, he subsequently found other ways to access children.
Duggan went on, after that incident, to actively abusing children, and paying their desperate (not that this is an excuse) mothers for the privilege of doing so. That is the crime for which he is now starting his seven-year sentence, and views will certainly vary on whether seven years is long enough. More on that anon.
But there’s a question which, it seems to me, is rather obvious: Why was he still on the streets, and in a position to commit a series of further attempted abuses on young boys and girls, and ultimately to engage in the kind of abuse that he did?
If you asked a normal person in Ireland what the penalty should be for somebody who approaches two 11- and 12-year-old girls and sends them naked photos of himself, their answer, I suspect, would be fairly clear: Jail. And yet, in this case, Duggan, it appears, escaped with his liberty and a (presumably stern) warning from the system.
But Duggan’s actions with the two girls were not just run of the mill paedophilia. Gross as this may be to write, there’s a difference between somebody who is searching porn sites for “schoolgirl”, and somebody who is taking those impulses into the real world, with actual children. The moment he texted children asking for naked pictures should have been the moment that it was obvious to the authorities and the justice system that this person was not just a garden variety perv, but an actual, active threat to actual children.
The Gardai and the justice system did not just have suspicions: Per David Raleigh’s reporting, they had him red-handed. They had his phone. They had his laptop. They had the messages to the two girls, and the naked photo that he sent of himself.
This is what the most recent edition of the Sexual Offences act says:
(1) A person who by means of information and communication technology communicates with another person (including a child) for the purpose of facilitating the sexual exploitation of a child by that person or any other person shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years.
If Raleigh’s reporting is correct, and there is no reason at all to doubt it, the authorities had Duggan bang to rights on precisely that charge. He used technology to communicate with a child for the purposes of sexual exploitation. That offence carries a penalty of up to 14 years.
And instead, he remained a free man. That this is not a scandal dominating the airwaves today boggles the mind.
By the way, on the subject of the sentence he did receive – 7 years, effectively – this is what he could have gotten:
(1) A person who—
(a) intentionally meets, or travels with the intention of meeting a child or makes arrangements with the intention of meeting a child or for a child to travel, whether or not from within the State, having communicated by any means with that child on at least one previous occasion, and
(b) does so for the purpose of doing anything that would constitute sexual exploitation of the child,
shall be guilty of an offence.
(2) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years.
Duggan received exactly half of the maximum sentence he could have been given.
Why? A question, again, for our honourable friends in the Judiciary.