A 33-year-old man has been jailed for 6½ years after he admitted breaking into a woman’s home, sexually and physically assaulting her and physically assaulting her teenage daughter before the woman manage to fight him off with a hurley.
Christopher Ryan, a native of Thurles, Co Tipperary, but with an address at Fernhill Woods, Clonakilty, Co Cork, had previously pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault of the woman, assault causing harm to both her and her daughter, false imprisonment of both and burglary.
On Friday at the Central Criminal Court in Cork, Ms Justice Siobhán Lankford recalled the evidence that she had previously heard from Det Garda Paul Cullen of the Cork county protective services unit, who investigated the attack on the family in their home on January 12th, 2025.
She recalled how the alarm was raised by a neighbour at about 5am when she heard the woman’s daughter screaming for help outside her house, saying there was a man beating her mother in their home and she found the mother frantically looking for her daughter.
The man had broken into the house and entered the woman’s upstairs bedroom, but when she kicked out at him, he began grappling with her, digitally penetrating her vagina and anus through her pyjamas before he began pummelling in the face and head.
Ms Justice Lankford noted the woman genuinely believed Ryan was trying to knock her unconscious so he could sexually assault her daughter, but when he released her to chase after the girl, she picked up a hurley, hit him on the head and knocked him down the stairs and fled.
She commended both the woman and daughter for the courage with which they had delivered victim-impact statements where they detailed how they had struggled to come to terms with the distress and trauma caused by Ryan’s actions that night.
The woman had told how there were no words to convey the devastating impact that the man’s invasion of her home and violation of her body had on her, and she continued to be haunted by what happened to her and her daughter that night.
The woman’s daughter, who is in her early teens, told in her victim-impact statement how she can’t walk anywhere in the dark on her own without fearing something is going to happen to her, while she also found it very difficult to live with the memory of what happened that night.
“The fact that he broke into our house … where I am supposed to be safe makes me even more scared about what can happen in other places. Now, I don’t feel safe in my own house, so I can’t have friends over for sleepovers and I can’t sleep in my friend’s house.”
Ms Justice Lankford noted Ryan was out on bail at the time on a rape charge for which he was later sentenced to 10½ years and it was deeply concerning that he should commit a similar type offence so soon after that offence, which happened on November 11th, 2023.
Ms Justice Lankford said she believed the offending merited a headline sentence of 12 years but she would reduce it to nine years in light of his guilty plea and she would reduce it further by another year to eight years in light of his previous good behaviour.
But, taking account of the principles of totality and proportionality given any sentence she imposed had to be consecutive to his 10-year rape sentence, she suspended the final 18 months, leaving Ryan with 6½ years to serve upon the expiry of his 10-year rape term.