A man accused of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in west Dublin in October has been sent forward for trial.<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old non-Irish national appeared again at Cloverhill District Court for his ninth hearing and was served with a book of evidence by the prosecution.<\/p>\n
Judge \u00c1ine Shannon granted a return for trial order and remanded him in custody to appear at the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on a date in May.<\/p>\n
The accused, who cannot be named for legal reasons and has yet to enter a plea, was initially charged with sexual assault of the girl at Garter Lane in Saggart on October 20th, 2025, and was remanded in custody a day later.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Garda Sergeant Connolly said the man replied, “I have nothing to say,” to that charge.<\/p>\n
The child had been missing from care.<\/p>\n
Last month, a second count was brought against him for sexual assault of the same complainant at another location close to Garter Lane.<\/p>\n
His reply to that charge was “I spoke to my solicitor and told him she sat beside me; you can check the CCTV. She started talking to me and I asked her her age, she told me she was 18. I just kissed her.”<\/p>\n
Garda Sergeant Connolly has already said the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has directed trial on indictment.<\/p>\n
The man had the assistance of an Arabic interpreter during the hearing after the courtroom was cleared for the in-camera proceedings.<\/p>\n
There was no application for bail.<\/p>\n
Legal aid was granted. He must notify the prosecution within 14 days if he intends to use an alibi in his defence.<\/p>\n
Following the alleged assault, there were violent scenes in Citywest, Dublin, resulting in more than 30 arrests, and garda\u00ed suffering injuries, and a Garda vehicle was burned out. Court prosecutions have commenced while an investigation continues to identify others at the scene.<\/p>\n
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, you can call the national 24-hour Rape Crisis Helpline at 1800-77 8888, access text service and webchat options at drcc.ie\/services\/helpline\/ or visit Rape Crisis Help.\u00a0In the case of an emergency, always dial 999\/112.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man accused of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in west Dublin in October has been sent forward…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-270923","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}