Primal Sneeze

From the Irish Independent (and fek their copyright - this is too important ).

Other Bloggers, please link to this, or to any other Irish blogger’s post on this subject. e.g. The Swearing Lady; Twenty Major.

If you are Irish, berate your local T.D.s and Senators to change the law now! If your are not Irish, berate your own government to, in turn, berate the Irish government to change our law now! This may be the first time Bloggers actually change something. If you can’t phone, or meet them in person, eMail addresses are usually formatted as firstname.surname@oireachtas.ie or go to the Oireachtas website for the correct one.
A WOMAN who was raped in her home has waived her right to anonymity in seeking an appeal against a suspended sentence for her attacker.

Mary Shannon (33) said she felt the entire justice system had let her down after the man convicted of raping her escaped being sent to jail.

Ms Shannon’s call both for the sentence to be appealed and for the introduction of assessed sentences for rape was backed by anti-rape campaigners and by Fine Gael’s Olwyn Enright.

Ms Shannon described how, when travelling to Dublin for last Monday’s sentence hearing, her attacker had been on the same train and how, after he was set free by the court, she again had to walk past him on the train on the return journey to Ennis.

She spoke of the “devastation” she felt when, at the Central Criminal Court on Monday, Mr Justice Paul Carney imposed a three-year suspended sentence in place of a jail term. “I was a victim yet I was made to feel like a criminal. Justice was not done.”

Ms Shannon said she could not understand how the judge could justify his decision, particularly as earlier in the same court on Monday he had imposed a 15-year sentence on a man convicted of raping a 74-year-old woman.

Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre said last night that the suspended sentence sent out a “a really bad message” to both the perpetrators of such crimes and their victims.

“This sends out a very dangerous message to rape victims - that even if the rapist is found guilty there is no guarantee they will be locked up,” said Olwyn Enright.

Mr Justice Carney said on Monday that his decision to impose a suspended sentence was based on a previous ruling by the Court of Criminal Appeal in relation to a sentence imposed by him in a previous similar case by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Mr Carney said that appeal had been lost and the sentencing set aside.

It was in May 2005 that Adam Keane, now 20, of Barnageeha, Daragh, Co Clare, broke into Ms Shannon’s house and raped her while her children slept in the next room. Keane claimed he did not remember anything and had been high on drink and drugs.

“I really thought justice was going to be done and it was only a matter of how many years in jail he was going to get,” Ms Shannon said yesterday. “Who would want to report this type of crime now?” she told RTE television news.

Earlier, on Radio One’s ‘Liveline’ programme, she told presenter Joe Duffy that she was unable to return to her home and was back living with her children in her parents’ house.

Fiona Neary, director of the Rape Crisis Centre network, said she was concerned about the message that a suspended sentence sent out to other sexual predators.

Eugene Moloney