A man who engaged in a prolonged campaign of coercive control and violence against his partner, forcing her to keep a camera doorbell on her so he could monitor her at all times, has been jailed for five years.
He had weekly access to his two children with the woman, who queried in her victim impact statement why there was no link between family and criminal courts when it comes to decisions on child custody.
"He should not be allowed access to the children," she said.
The man, 40s, who cannot be named to protect the anonymity of the children, pleaded guilty to one count of coercive control and three counts of assault causing harm to the woman between 2017 and 2020.
The Circuit Criminal Court heard that he took the woman's social welfare payments, did not allow her to have a phone, isolated her from her family, installed a house alarm but did not give her the code to restrict her movements and locked doors in the house.
The man also bought a ring doorbell and forced her to have it with her at all times so he could watch her and ensure she was not "entertaining" anyone, a garda witness told Senior Counsel Dominic McGinn, prosecuting.
When he rang the doorbell, she had to answer it instantly and show him both her hands and what she was doing, the court heard.
In her victim impact statement, which she read out in court, the woman said that towards the end of the relationship, she was being beaten by the man on a near daily basis.
She described the fear it caused her children, who eventually stopped asking her why she was bruised.
The woman also recalled being told by her son's national school teacher that he had expressed fear that his mother was going to be killed by the man.
On one trip abroad, he was taken into custody by police who released him when she agreed not to press charges.
The court heard the couple met online shortly after she had broken up with a previous partner - with whom she had children.
She and her children moved in with the man in the following year and he started behaving violently towards her about nine months later.
The woman had two more children with the man, the court was told, but also suffered a miscarriage in the course of their relationship.
He accused her of taking something to "kill the baby" and also talked about taking a DNA test to ensure it was definitely his. This did not ultimately take place.
The woman described attempting to escape the man on one occasion, taking the children in a taxi to a post office to get her welfare payment and leave, only to be met by him outside and brought back home.
She eventually successfully escaped him after he assaulted her while pregnant, getting a taxi to her parents' house where she arrived with "nothing", including the means to pay the fare.
The woman reported the man to gardaí and underwent a series of interviews over a number of months so investigators could get a full picture of the allegations.
Senior Counsel Mark Lynam defending, said that after the miscarriage, the couple were abusing drugs and alcohol as a way of "numbing themselves" and that the man's drug use spiralled.
He is now drug-free, the court heard, working part-time and caring for a family member.
A number of references, including from a former partner and two subsequent partners, were handed into court.
Sentencing the man, the judge said the case involved serious and prolonged misbehaviour.
"There is a pattern of physical violence, a pattern of verbal violence, a pattern of totally controlling her, a pattern of assaulting her and a pattern of humiliating and ridiculing her," he said.
"She will suffer long-term effects".
The judge said he had no doubt there were "dozens of assaults" inflicted on the woman.
Taking into account the maximum sentence for each offence is five years, he set a headline term of eight years, reducing this to five years.
