Man jailed for assaulting mother of his children

This article contains references to rape. Reader discretion is advised.

By Natasha Reid

A father-of-three has been jailed for a year and a half for threatening to kill and rape the mother of his children and wipe her family off the map.

He also assaulted her in front of their two younger children, aged eight and 10, Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard.

The 40-year-old, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the children, was before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court where he pleaded guilty to threatening to kill or cause serious harm to the woman on April 1, 2022, and to assaulting her outside her home three days later.

The court heard that the injured party and the accused had been in a relationship for 11 years and had three children together. However, the relationship had ended eight years before the offences.

By then, their eldest child was an adult, their 10-year-old daughter was living with the accused and their eight-year-old son was living with the victim. On  April 1, a dispute arose between the two parents about who would give their daughter €10 to meet up with friends, and the accused sent a series of threatening WhatsApp voice notes to his ex-partner.

Transcripts of the messages were read out in court and included a threat to ‘bounce a kettle bell off your f****ing head’ and that she would ‘know what it feels like to be raped’.

“No matter what pub or house you go to, I will track you down and I will f***ing kill you,” he threatened. “I’ll go to jail with a f***ing smile on my face. I’ll leave you looking like Frankenstein.”

He called her a ‘stupid tramp’, a ‘little fat sh*t’, and told her that her whole family would be wiped out.

“I’ll go to jail for the rest of my life,” he said. “I’m a one-man f***ing army.”

He then said that he was not threatening anyone.

“This is a promise,” he said. “If I have to go to jail for 50 years”.

The court heard that three days later, the woman saw the man and his mother driving past her home with her two children in the car. Her son, the accused and his mother all got out. She said that he ran at her and punched her in the face so hard that a false tooth came flying out.

She said that her son started screaming and hid.

She said that the accused also kicked and punched her in the head while she was on the ground.

Mobile phone footage taken from across the road showed a different version of events. The court heard that it showed the man’s mother trying to defuse the situation, before both of them returned to the car. However, before his mother could close the door, the woman pushed the door closed on her.

The man reacted and approached the complainant. She hit him first, and he then punched her into the face and she fell to the ground.

Photographs of her injuries were shown to the judge.

When arrested, the defendant said that he had been acting in defence of his mother.

When the threats were put to him, he said that it was a type of joke and that he didn’t intend to carry them out.

He described them as stupid messages, with no meaning behind them, and that he was ‘just trying to get to her’. He said the threat about bouncing the kettle bell off her face was made out of frustration.

He said that the threat to rape her was not made to put her in fear.

“I’m not a rapist,” he said. “I’d no intention of harming her. I don’t know why I said it.”

He told gardai he was disgusted by what he said.

The man said that his ex-partner had been winding him up for years, saying that one of their children was not his.

The court heard that he had 23 previous convictions, including one for assault, and is on a methadone programme for heroin addiction.

Judge Orla Crowe noted that he had assaulted his former partner in the presence of their two young children, and described this as an aggravating factor.

She noted that he had described the threats as a type of joke.

“They were no joke, but really serious, vile threats against a former intimate partner,” she said.

She described their nature as obscene and disrespectful towards the mother of his children, and said that they were seriously frightening and upsetting.

“These have to be marked with a custodial sentence,” she said. “It was not all just words. They were nasty, menacing humiliating and insulting and very violent threats.”

She imposed a sentence of two and a half years, but suspended the final year and put the man under the supervision of the Probation Service.