A 34-year-old man who was found with over 2,000 child porn images at his home in Cork said he worked with sexual offenders and paedophiles and was ‘trying to figure them out.’
Denis O’Donovan, who worked for the Child and Family Agency Tusla, pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography at his home at Forest Ridge, Doughcloyne, Togher, on March 9, 2017, when he appeared at Cork Circuit Criminal Court on Thursday.
Det Garda David Noonan of the Garda Protective Services Unit in Cork city, said gardaí were initially alerted to the offence by the National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre based in Canada who directed them to O'Donovan's address.
He said a team of gardaí under Insp Noel Madden went to the defendant’s home where they seized his computer which was found to contain 2,350 images and 14 video files featuring child pornography.
Research
Det Garda Noonan said O’Donovan denied any wrongdoing and said he was researching child pornography as part of his work with Tusla in their South Lee Social Department where he said he was part of an anti-pornography group.
The detective said the images were of the most serious Category 1 type. One of the video files was 43 seconds long and showed a four-year-old girl being subjected to penetrative and non-penetrative sexual acts by an adult male.
“He acknowledged he was in possession of these images. He aligned himself with an anti-child pornography group and described the images as tame saying each child was not in distress. He said he worked with sexual offenders and paedophiles and was trying to figure them out
“(Later) he said it started in his 20s. It escalated from looking at children under 17, naked. He would masturbate to these pictures. It was always pictures he would have preferred,” Det Garda Noonan told the court.
Defence barrister, Sinead Behan said her client was not charged with any distribution offence and she put it to Det Garda Noonan and he agreed that O’Donovan’s position with Tusla was administrative and he had no contact with children in his work.
Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin said it was a particularly concerning case given O’Donovan’s employment at the time with Tusla but he appeared to have dealt with the matter correctly by making admission to his wife and getting help for addressing his problems.
He agreed to a defence application to adjourn the matter until November 1 to allow for an update on his progress in therapy but he warned that he was not binding himself on whether or not there would a custodial or non-custodial sentence at the end. The defendant was remanded on bail until that date.
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