THE JURY HAS begun deliberations in the trial of a garda accused of raping his former wife and of child cruelty towards two of his daughters.

The 48-year-old defendant has pleaded not guilty to one count of child cruelty of his now 17-year-old daughter on dates between 2015 and 2024.

He has also pleaded not guilty to two counts of raping his wife on dates in 2009 and 2021.

He has further pleaded not guilty to two counts of child cruelty of his now 24-year-old daughter on unknown dates between 2007 and 2020. He also denies a charge of assault causing harm to this daughter on an unknown date in late 2021 to early 2022, after she had turned 18.

All parties in the case have a statutory right to anonymity. The alleged offending took place at two locations in the north-west of the country where the family was living at the relevant times.

The jury has heard that the defendant is a serving member of the gardaí who is on suspension pending the outcome of this prosecution. He has no previous convictions.

On the afternoon of day seven of the trial, after being charged in the law by Justice Sean Gillane, the jury began deliberations. The jury went home at 4pm and will resume deliberations on Wednesday morning.

Earlier the jury heard closing speeches from barristers from the prosecution and defence.

Dominic McGinn SC, prosecuting, told the jury that the offence of child cruelty is where a person wilfully assaults, ill-treats or neglects a child in a manner likely to cause unnecessary suffering or injury to the child’s health or to seriously affect his or her wellbeing.

He said being a parent is not easy and that every parent makes mistakes and gets some things wrong from time to time. He said there is a dividing line between what is ill-treatment and what is reasonable chastisement and reasonable discipline and that it was a matter for the jury to decide if that line had been crossed by the accused.

He said that in relation to the evidence of the defendant’s daughters they might decide that some of the alleged behaviour was innocuous, some “were just mean”.

“For some, you might have thought, ‘I’d have done that’,” he said. He said it is the State’s case that taken together the “overall behaviour” of the defendant amounts to “crossing that line”.

“It wasn’t just somebody being a strict parent or exercising reasonable discipline,” he said.

He told the jury that “the real battlefield” in the trial was whether or not the alleged events happened.

“These events are denied. Surely if they were suggested as reasonable, that would be the [defendant’s] position,” he said.

He said that the wife and daughters of the accused all gave consistent testimony of “violence in the home”, of a pervasive sense of anger all the time and that the accused was very difficult to be around.

He said the jury must decide if it was reasonably possibly that none of the alleged incidents occurred and that this was an elaborate plot by the three complainants.

He said the evidence was that the complaint to gardaí only came out of a referral from Tusla which, in turn, came from a referral from the Jigsaw counselling service after the younger daughter made a disclosure to a therapist.

“It seems a bizarre and complicated way to fabricate allegations,” he said.

The evidence was that the woman made her first complaint to a Tusla social worker and this social worker contacted gardaí. McGinn said it was only at this point that it became clear to the complainant that gardaí were taking her allegations seriously.

“You can imagine the fears of someone who is married to a garda. How can she report something like this to people who are effectively colleagues of her husband?” counsel said. He said this was a real feature of the case which the jury could consider when assessing the credibility of the witness and her allegations.

Refuting any suggestion that the three of them were motivated to lie by vindictiveness, he said that didn’t make sense if the accused was innocent of the alleged offences

“There is no reason why any of them would have said any of these things if they weren’t true. You can be satisfied that all three are honest, reliable and truthful witnesses,” he said. He told jurors that if they were so satisfied, they could convict the defendant.

James McGowan SC, defending, submitted that the witnesses were unreliable and the prosecution case was “simply incredible”.

He said the allegation that his client is a rapist and capable of child cruelty was set against the background where his ex-partner, who alleges the rapes, “is happy” for the accused to have unsupervised access to the other younger children.

“She has no concern for the safety of those children,” he said. He told the jury that the complainant’s evidence was that she and the accused were in regular communication about these children, including up to the start of the trial to arrange their child care.

He asked the jury to consider a letter written by the woman to his client in June 2021, when she moved herself and the children out of the family home.

In the letter the complainant tells the accused that he hadn’t hit her but that he was “very controlling and volatile” and that she wanted out of the marriage and “can’t keep living this lie”.

Counsel asked the jury to consider that there was no mention in this letter of any domestic violence involving the children and no mention of rape.

He said that the complainant had testified that she had never read the journals of the two daughters alleging child cruelty. He said the evidence of text messages showed her telling her older daughter that she wanted to look over her journal “just in case there’s anything I witnessed”.

He said her daughter testified that if her mother had asked to see the journal she “probably did” show it to her as “she didn’t hide anything from her”. He said it was curious that the complainant needed her daughter’s journal to see if she witnessed any of the incidents of alleged child cruelty.

“There is a lot of the parts of this story that don’t make sense and don’t add up,” McGowan said.

He told jurors that “you should have a doubt about everything you heard here and you should acquit if do have that doubt”.

The trial continues.