A 65-year-old man has been convicted of possessing hundreds of thousands of images of child pornography.
A jury at the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court took just under 20 minutes to convict Raphael Farina of Spranger's Yard, Crowe Street, Dublin 2.
Farina, a former Central Bank employee, had conceded that material found at his home during a garda search contained child pornography, but had contested the validity of the warrant used to search his home.
The trial heard he had 760,000 files relating to or containing child pornography on CDs, DVDs and computer discs when gardaí searched his home in June 2007.
Gardaí also found 10,000 images on his home computer.
The jury was told the files contained images, videos and instructions from paedophile groups who specialised in sharing information.
Farina told gardaí he had been downloading child pornography for ten years and had thousands of images.
When his apartment was searched, he handed a box to gardaí containing CDs and DVDs and said 'there is no point denying it'.
Farina also said he had images that he had downloaded from the internet on a computer hard drive.
Detective Garda Gerard Keane, a computer forensic examiner, told the court he found 10,000 images on the defendant's home computer.
Det Keane said some of the files had descriptive names and showed graphic images of sexual activity with young children.
Over 100 of the images involved babies or toddlers. Hundreds of thousands of files were found on disc.
Some contained images and videos, others contained instructions from paedophile groups on how to down load child pornography without being detected.
Farina told gardaí the material in the box had been kept at work and he had taken it home the previous day.
He said he had never downloaded the material at work. He said he was fascinated by breaking the codes and 'just kept decrypting it'. He told gardaí it became an obsession.
Farina was remanded on bail and will be sentenced on 7 February.
