A JUDGE has jailed a man who breached a barring order seven times in six months, including leaving threatening messages on his former partner’s phone.
Limerick District Court heard that the man – who cannot be named as the hearing against him was held behind closed doors – hoped to pursue a career in the armed forces.
Judge Carol Anne Coolican handed down a number of jail terms after she took time outside court to read a victim impact statement made by the woman and mother of the man’s two children.
Judge Coolican noted that the victim says she “had to barricade herself in the children’s room” and “no longer feels safe in her own home or to allow the children play in the front garden”.
Previously, the court heard evidence that the accused, between December and June, made two attempts to enter his former partner’s house where she and their children live in the early hours of the morning, in breach of the court order barring him from contacting her.
Judge Coolican also heard that, on four occasions, he rang her and left threatening messages.
On another occasion, he was knocking at the door and calling through the letterbox at 1.50am.
His solicitor said that after Gardaí arrested him and having spent some time in custody waiting for the matters to come to court, “he has had time to reflect”.
“Their relationship broke up and he did not take it well,” the court was told.
The solicitor said his client had been behaving in a manner which was “at first a nuisance” but took on a more “sinister” tone.
“Since being taken into custody, he has decided to be done with this type of behaviour and he is aware that he must make the appropriate (court) applications.”
The court heard that the man has a continuous record of employment and hoped to make an application to join the armed forces. “But that is knocked on the head now,” he said.
Judge Coolican noted that the law requires a stiffer penalty for such offences when the offender and the victim have been in an intimate relationship.
She said she was giving him credit for his guilty plea and his previously clean record. She gave him jail sentences totalling 13 months, with two of the three-month sentences to run concurrently and two months of one five-month sentence suspended for two years.
