A mother who facilitated the rape of her almost six-year-old daughter by the child's uncle has been sentenced to 15 years in prison at the Central Criminal Court.
The woman was also sentenced to five years each for two charges of sexually assaulting the child when she was four years old, which she will serve concurrently.
The woman’s brother, the child’s uncle, was also sentenced for raping the child after his sister brought him into a bedroom where the child had been lying on bed watching television.
The court heard that the woman remained in the room during the rape and afterwards lifted her daughter from the bed and returned her to her own bed in another room.
The sexual assault offences occured on dates between January and September 2001 and the rape charge, including the facilitation of the rape, occured in March 2003.
The now 52-year-old woman was convicted by a Central Criminal Court jury last July following an 18-day trial.
Both she and the child's uncle maintained their innocence throughout and did not accept the vedict of the jury.
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Ms Justice Eileen Creedon said this was an abuse of trust of the most depraved nature by the child's biological uncle and mother for their own sexual gratification.
The two incidents of sexual assault had occured at an even younger age when the child was just 4 years old.
In her victim impact statement given last October, the woman who is now in her 20s said she had lived in an abusive, chaotic house and she was never spared abuse, feeling used, abandoned and betrayed.
She continued to suffer PTSD and high levels of anxiety but in October she said she was now a survivor.
She said telling the truth saves you and others and the cycle had now been broken.
The judge today commended her extreme bravery including withstanding the trial process.
She said her uncle, who is now 46, had also not acknowledged the jury verdict and the victim had received no apology.
The judge said as a child she should have been nurtured, but instead she had been treated to cruel and depraved treatment.
She said the headline sentence for this case in respect of both offenders was 16 years, and noted they had not acknowledged the trauma they had caused to the victim.
However, she noted the mother had no previous convictions and the uncle had no previous convictions relevant to this case.
She sentenced them both to 15 years in custody, backdated in the case of the mother to July 2025 and in the case of the uncle to November 2024.
