'One child abuse image one too many,' judge tells 73-year-old Cork man

An elderly West Cork man who was caught distributing one child sexual abuse image was told by the sentencing judge that “even one is one too many”.

Judge Helen Boyle made this comment to 73-year-old Barry Moloney, of Ardán, Bandon, Co Cork, as she imposed a three-year suspended sentence on him at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.

“You were caught with 136 images of child pornography, or what are child sexual abuse images,” Judge Boyle said. “And the evidence is you distributed one image.”

The judge said that while the court had heard cases involving thousands of such images, Moloney’s was not such a case and was not at the upper end of the scale, but that distributing even one image was too many.

The judge stressed that it was not a victimless crime.

Paula McCarthy, defence barrister, said Moloney co-operated with the investigation, had no previous convictions, and signed a plea of guilty and was deemed by the Probation Service to be at a low risk of re-offending.

He had not come to adverse attention since the matter emerged in 2019.

The barrister also described various health issues suffered by the defendant.

Ms McCarthy said the defendant had addressed his issues with a psychologist specialising in this area.

Sergeant Fintan Slater said that gardaí went to the defendant’s house back in 2019 and seized a number of electronic devices, which were subsequently forensically analysed and found to contain a total of 136 images, and evidence that he sent one image on Facebook to someone in the UK.

Of the images, 31 were the most serious category of children engaged in, or witnessing, sexual acts, and 74 were in the second category, of children with anal or genital areas exposed.