A CRUEL STEPFATHER who treated his partner’s children “like slaves”, subjecting them to almost daily physical and degrading mental abuse in the Midlands in the 1990s, has been jailed for four years.

The three complainants, now in their 30s and 40s, described their years of torment living with the man as a “house of horrors”, and his version of discipline was likened to that of an army drill sergeant or a dictator who warned them, “Don’t you say a word”.

In his sentencing remarks, Judge Keenan Johnson said the man, now in his mid-60s, ruled the household by fear, and the treatment of his stepchildren was absolutely shocking and “bordering on sadism”.

He said it appeared like the grief-stricken household was run like a workhouse, similar to the one described by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist.

“It is clear the children and the household were ruled with a rod of iron by the accused; he used violence, intimidation, malnourishment and degradation as tools of repression and control,” he said.

He stole their childhood, and it seemed their mother was afraid of him.

Judge Johnson praised the victims for coming forward, which will highlight the issue of child abuse and show a pathway to others seeking justice.

Mullingar Circuit Criminal Court heard that decades later, the siblings, two sisters and their brother, remain scarred.

Their mother’s partner pleaded guilty to three counts of child cruelty.

He also admitted assault causing harm to the brother, with 19 other counts of that offence marked proved and taken into consideration on a full facts basis.

The boy was in early childhood and the girls in their teenage years when they endured beatings by the accused on an almost daily basis, constant manual labour outdoors and constant cleaning in the home, often punished more after they were “set up to fail”, usually being left hungry or, on one occasion, violently force-fed.

One of his degrading phrases was “You have nothing, you are nothing”.

The abuse meted out by the accused, who is not being named to protect the victims’ anonymity, took place over about five years beginning in the early nineties.

Judge Johnson heard how the man lost his own mother at a young age and ended up in a children’s home until his father remarried. When he went home, however, he did not get on with his stepmother and fled to experience homelessness in his teens.

Judge Johnson said it was somewhat cruel and ironic that he had suffered such trauma in his own childhood that he would have gone on to treat the stepchildren in such a cruel and uncompassionate way.

“One would have thought that he would have empathy for the situation the stepchildren found themselves in, but regrettably this was not the case.”

He said the man did not have the tools to parent properly, but it was not an excuse for the suffering he inflicted.

Corporal punishment had been outlawed over a decade earlier. The defence submitted that it was still not unusual then, and that the accused was a product of his time, to be judged by the standards of the time.

But Judge Johnson pointed out that society had changed and it was difficult to understand the stepfather’s approach to child raising.

However, he accepted that it was prevalent during the accused’s childhood and influenced his attitude toward parenting and added that there could be no excuse for the extreme pain he inflicted.

The man, with no prior convictions, brought €5,000 to court to be distributed among the victims who had come face to face with him for the first time in years.

He remained silent but proffered an apology through counsel, which the judge found to be “too little too late”.

However, his guilty plea was taken into account, as it spared the complainants the re-victimisation of a trial.

He was held to be at a low risk of reoffending due to his lack of prior offences, age and poor health and allied to this, he was no longer in a parental role.

Westmeath-based Garda James Grogan told the court the victims’ family had already endured years of hardship, and the children were grieving the death of their father when the accused, then in his early 30s, entered their lives. He started a relationship with the victims’ mother.

The brother’s earliest memory of him was as a young boy aged about six or seven. The boy was fond of sitting on an eight-foot porch roof.

During that first encounter, the accused grabbed his leg and pulled him down “out of nowhere” and punched him in the face with a closed fist, causing him to bleed. He moved in shortly after that.

The abuse continued from that day and the boy developed a problem where he began soiling himself. This issue led to the child being forced to sit on the toilet until he had a bowel movement.

Once, when he was a bit older, the stepfather brought him outside, made him stand in an old bath, covered him in washing-up liquid, and hosed him down with freezing water.

The stepfather made him fight one of his brothers, or else he would be punished.

The children were sent out daily to chop or gather kindling, made to work long hours on the bog, and forced to labour for others for hardly any pay.

They recalled how he always threw sods of turf at them and hurt them when they were bagging the fuel.

He was obsessed with cutting all their fingers and toenails, extra short, causing bleeding, and then scrubbing them with a nail brush.

Food was “rationed”: breakfast every day was porridge with salt and they were forbidden to go to the fridge and never allowed to have tea or juice.

In one instance, one of the girls was forced to clean the tiles behind the range and was attacked when she mentioned it was too hot. The court heard he was obsessed with getting them to clean the house constantly.

The boy was locked in a cold shed overnight on some occasions.

During one dinner, one of the sisters, in her teens, said the curry was too spicy, and the accused used a spoon to force-feed it down her throat, making her ill.

They were never allowed to go to their mother’s bedroom as they had before.

He also made efforts to hide the abuse from social welfare and gardaí and beat the children in parts of the body where bruising, often from his ring, was not visible.

The court heard the boy wished he could have finished school and gone to college, but he was pulled out at a young age and was forced to take a job.

He began inhaling petrol and gas when he was a teenager. That led eventually to drug abuse and interactions with gardaí.

They were forced to wear ill-fitting second-hand clothing, which led to school bullying.

The boy was also headbutted, called “dirty animal” or “filthy fuck”, and the stepfather always called him “little boy”. Once, his sister witnessed him thrown like a rag doll.

They were made to carry heavy lumps of wood that they could barely lift.

His victims remembered the sounds of screaming in the home, where they described him as being in a frenzy during the attacks, during which he also used a steel poker.

The children believed their mother said nothing out of fear and due to suffering from depression.

The court heard how he ransacked their rooms if they were not tidied up well enough and would make them start all over again.

He constantly avoided spending money, they were not allowed to watch television, had no holidays or affection and recalled being humiliated, his “pure hatred”, and “living in a nightmare”.

The other sister told the court the man insisted she call them dad in front of her siblings and was punched for it, and once was held down on her bed, struggling to breathe.

Years later, they attempted to take their lives, with one having already left and trying to overdose due to the guilt of leaving the siblings behind.

The boy recalled that part of his life as years of torture and suffering, and the sisters vividly remembered their constant fear on the way home from school and how hunger became normal.

Garda Grogan agreed with defence senior counsel John Hayden that the family had been experiencing hardship before the accused came into their lives.

Hayden, in the mitigation plea, said the man had grown up in care and experienced homelessness at a young age and did not understand how to deal with becoming the man of the house after he came into the ready-made family.

Social foster services had already been involved before he met the woman. He remains in a relationship with their mother, who has health issues and relies on him, counsel said.