Father of sexual assault victim hits out at broken promises

The father of a young woman who was brutally sexually assaulted by a man who served just four months in prison for the crime has hit out at ‘broken’ government promises made in the wake of high-profile attacks on women.

In 2012, convicted sex offender and millionaire airline boss Anthony Lyons was jailed for six years – with five and half years of the sentence suspended – following a trial at the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.

The court heard how the father-of-four attacked his victim just yards from his Dublin home, creeping up behind her and asking her, ‘Are you going to get home safely?’ before rugby tackling her into a bush and assaulting her.

A year before Lyons’s sentence, then Fine Gael justice spokesman Alan Shatter said his party would introduce electronic tagging for sex offenders within a year of taking office.

But the father of the Lyons’s victim this weekend said: ‘Here we are well over a decade later and that still hasn’t happened.’

He said ‘minimum sentencing was also spoken about at that time’.

The victim’s father said: ‘I was promised by then Taoiseach Enda Kenny a meeting with Shatter’s successor Frances Fitzgerald in 2014.’

‘None of it ever happened, even after a nationwide outcry. Sound familiar?’