A Tullamore woman whose children were groomed and sexually abused by her former partner has spoken out to warn other parents about what her family has been through.
"Please be careful. The person who is the paedophile looks and dresses and eats and speaks and works, just like you and I, they are invisible," Georgina Touhey told Prime Time's Sarah McInerney.
"You cannot pick them out of the crowd, and that is why it is so insidious. They're walking, they're out there, and you will not pick them out. So please be careful who you live your child with," she added.
51-year-old Brendan Cornally was sentenced to 17-and-a-half years in total for the rape and sexual assault of Ms Touhey’s two sons and the sexual assault of her daughter. The final court hearings in relation to his crimes concluded in recent weeks.
He abused the children when each were between the ages of 10 and 15 years old, after he and Ms Touhey began a relationship and he moved into her home.
"My family, of course... they supported the relationship. They believed Brendan Cornally was a good man. He owned his own house, he minded his elderly parents."
"He fished, he was into boxing, he went camping. He did all the things that a family likes to do. Ordinary, everyday families, absolutely nothing different."
Cornally, a boxing coach, met Ms Touhey at a local boxing club, which her children later joined also. She said she only learned of his crimes during a row between two of her children.
"‘One said to the other, ‘tell Mum’ and I said, ‘tell me what?’" Ms Touhey told Prime Time.
"So I went to the other young man and I said, ‘what do you want to tell me?’ And he said that he's been going into Brendan Cornally's room, and then he started to tell me that he was in the bed with them."
"With that I went to the police and I phoned my daughter the next day to have a family meeting, and that's when she dropped the bombshell."
During their relationship, on foot of encouragement from Cornally, Ms Touhey began training for semi-professional boxing matches.
"So, of course, I was up at 6.30am in the morning and I was running the roads and I was training away, and I was training in the evening, and I was working during the day," she said, "little did I know, all the time he was grooming me. And then he started to take an interest in my children."
Cornally used PlayStations and money, as well as a boat, to induce the children to meet him in private places.
"He brought my boys to this boat and offered them a dream where they were going to do it up and they were going to go on weekends away, and they were going to have adventures on this boat, and it was going to be theirs," Ms Touhey said.
"But it turned out to be anything but, because that's where he used to bring them, and he'd put some boys up one end of the boat and bring one down with him."
She also said Cornally used alcohol to abuse her oldest child, the boys’ sister, when she was a young teenager. Ms Touhey’s daughter moved out of her home to live with relatives at a young age, something in retrospect Ms Touhey attributes to the presence of Cornally.
"When she was about 13, she came over and spent the weekend with me and of course I was out working - I was trying to earn money, enough to leave Tullamore to go to Kildare, I needed a deposit for a house.
"She remembers sitting on the couch with a blanket around her and he was sitting so close, and she cried in her mind, ‘mum, come home.’ She wanted me to come home. And I was out working."
"He followed her and he gave her drink, alcohol - which he had done on many occasions as it turned out - and she fell asleep, but not before wishing I would come home. That monster did that to my child."
Sarah McInerney's full interview with Georgina Touhey, produced by Tara Peterman, will broadcast on the 25 March edition of Prime Time on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player.
