Teens accused over racecourse rape 'acted as a group', trial told
The three accused have pleaded not guilty to the charges against them. File picture: Larry Cummins
Three teenage boys on trial at the Central Criminal Court for what allegedly happened to a girl in a car at Limerick Races were described by the prosecution as cackling, laughing, and encouraging each other as they “acted as a group”.
Prosecution senior counsel Dean Kelly made his closing speech to Mr Justice Paul McDermott and the 11-member jury of nine women and two men at the trial that is taking place in Cork.
While two defendants are charged with rape and sexual assault, and the third teenager is charged with false imprisonment and aiding and abetting, the prosecution senior said: “These boys acted as a group, each of them taking what they wanted from her physically and sexually in the way they went, whether she wanted to or not.
“From the time those three boys are in the car they are acting as a single unit. (name) moves the car — he says he just wanted to go for a drive. That is inherent nonsense. It was so that whatever was going on in the car was going to be done away from prying eyes.
“This is a group working together. (name of driver) is an enthusiastic member of the group who achieves his own sexual gratification."
Mr Kelly said that while there were some inconsistencies and contradictions between the accounts given by the three accused in Garda interviews, there were essentially two broad narratives in the case — one from the complainant and the other from the three accused.
He said that on her account, the complainant goes to the races with her friends at the age of 16, goes drinking, gets significantly drunk, ends up in the company of the three boys and that “as an ordinary part of teenage life” she consensually kisses the 13-year-old and consents but that her consent is only “up to a very certain point”.
Mr Kelly said that is her narrative, “and then there is what they have to say — what they tell the gardaí in lurid technicolour… in almost pornographic terms. (In their account) within moments of entering the car she is in total control of an orgy, she is portrayed as actively, sexually voracious, insatiable, controlling, demanding at every turn. That is what you are asked to consider as quite reasonably true.
“Those are the narratives in broad outline — a young girl consenting to low-level intimacy, and on the other hand she is described as sexually voracious.
“If what they say is true (the complainant) is not just a liar but a monstrous liar… Defence counsel say the idea that something terrible happened to her came later — from her friends and her family,” Mr Kelly said, adding that “her central motif — ‘I said no, I said no’,” was something she said before this.
“Each boy has asked you to believe that she is a nasty, evil, mendacious liar. Is it possible to believe that by the time she reached the car she was an almost transformed human being that she chose to lose her virginity in a dirty car with an audience of shouting and sniggering boys?”
One defendant, who was 13 at the time and is 15 now, and a co-accused, who was 15 at the time and is now 17, are both charged with raping and sexually assaulting the teenager at a St Stephen’s Day 2022 race meeting at Limerick Racecourse. A third boy is accused of aiding and abetting the first two defendants in carrying out these offences and he is also charged with falsely imprisoning the girl.
It is alleged that the contested incidents occurred in a car in a field car park at Limerick racecourse at Patrickswell, Co Limerick, on December 26, 2022. All three accused have pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.
