A man who handed himself into gardaí ten years after starting a fire in a house that claimed the lives of a father and daughter has been jailed for six-and-a-half years.
Philip Griffin, 37, said he "couldn't live with the guilt of what happened" and wanted to be locked up.
Anthony O'Brien got his wife out of the house in Tralee in Co Kerry, but could not save himself or his five-year-old daughter Nadine.
Mr Justice Paul McDermott said these were "harrowing circumstances" and the sentence imposed will not remove the grief.
Gardaí had insisted the fire which killed Mr O’Brien and his daughter was an accident, and closed the file on the case after no evidence of a crime was found.
However, ten years later Griffin came forward and told them he and another man went into the house in the early hours of the morning of 12 May 2012 and set fire to a couch because of a row over a €50 bag of heroin.
Mr O’Brien managed to lower his wife Kelly to jump to safety from an upstairs room, but he could not save himself or Nadine.
Their bodies were found wrapped in each other’s arms in the back bedroom.
Ms O’Brien said she spent years insisting the fire had been started deliberately and had been in and out of mental health units, but gardaí continued to insist it was an accident.
She told Griffin he had killed an innocent child and a good father who had never wronged him but only ever helped him.
However, because he had finally, after 12 years, come forward, she was now able to get justice.
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Griffin apologised for what he had done and said he now wanted to be locked up to deal with his guilt.
He pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter on the basis of gross negligence.
Mr Justice Paul McDermot said he accepted that Griffin did not know the other man was going to light the fire but he said "to walk away realising what a fire like that could do and not doing anything about it and knowing it was a family home is a very serious matter".
He said that there were substantial mitigating factors in particular his pleas of guilty and the fact that the case could not have been detected without him coming forward ten years after.
He also said that this was a gross negligence case with the emphasis on what he did not do.
He sentenced Griffin to seven years in prison with the final six months suspended.
