Wexford man guilty of abusing girl (6) 30 years ago: ‘He preyed upon my innocence’

But a jury of five women and six men refused to accept his not guilty plea, convicting him with a unanimous verdict.

The case went ahead despite objections from the defence arguing that the quarter century plus which has elapsed was too long of a delay in bringing the prosecution. However, Judge James McCourt ruled that the case could safely go ahead and it took three days of Wexford Circuit Court’s time before the guilty verdict was returned.

The injured party, now in her 30s, gave compelling evidence of what happened on the day she paid a visit to a houses in the Rosslare district.

The children present decided to play hide and seek out in the garden but the teenaged Buckley had another game in mind, a game which he called mirrors.

The court was told that the idea of the game was that he and the little girl would perform matching actions – if he touched her shoulder then she must touch his. The game being played in the privacy of a shed took a sinister turn when he told her to pull her pants down and he put a hand on her vagina.

He then directed her to put her hand on his penis: “My memory is that he took my hand and put it down his underwear and had me stroke his penis,” she said in the witness box.

The matter came to adult attention after she confided what had happened to an older brother, which led to their mother being informed.

When it was his turn to testify, the brother said she told him the penis was hairy and slimy, helping him to conclude that something was wrong. That evening, the six year old was brought to the home of her abuser where her father went to Buckley’s bedroom and confronted him with the allegation.

The accusation was denied that night by the youth but social workers were notified, leading to the victim being interviewed by the child care authorities. The defendant was also dealt with, sent to attend a clinic in Grogan’s Road, Wexford town, but the gardaí were not notified of what had happened.

It required a coincidence which occurred 23 years later in 2018 to finally bring the incident to their attention.

The jury learned how, after finishing in college, the complainant secured an internship with a local firm. She was appalled on her first day there to find that her tormentor was also on the pay-roll, a fact which only came to light when she saw him in the canteen at work.

She notified the company that she would not be able to continue working there in such circumstances but Buckley was not willing to step down from his job.

The exact date of the assault was traced through an entry in the diary of the complainant’s father for Sunday, May 28 in 1995 which read ‘trouble with Nigel’.

His wife recalled being absolutely horrified that her “little baby”, who was petite for her age, was defiled by someone who was then almost 15.

The mother confirmed to the trial that she and her husband did not report the matter to the gardaí at the time as they thought that child protection personnel would do that: “We were in such shock, we did not know what to do,” she recalled.

Evidence was also provided by Nigel Buckley’s mother Lorna who told how her husband died in 1990 while they were living in Cork.

His passing prompted a move the following year to her native county of Wexford.

After the allegations of sexual assault surfaced in 1995, she and her son were asked to go to the clinic in Grogan’s Road and were also given an appointment to see a woman in Spawell Road. That was the last they heard about the matter at the time and gardaí never made contact.

Eventually, decades later, the matter re-surfaced and Garda David Fitzgerald was assigned to the case, taking a formal statement from the accused in December of 2020.

In the statement, Buckley described himself as a data analyst and said he had no idea why the allegation was being made.

Defending barrister Roderick O’Hanlon pointed out that, if the case had been taken before his client was 18, it might well have been handled by a juvenile liaison garda and never brought to court. Counsel also stressed that Buckley, now a married man whose wife was present throughout the trial, had got on with his life with no suggestion of any repeated misbehaviour.

It took the jury less than two hours to reach their unanimous guilty verdict which prompted hugs for the tearful complainant from members of her family.

Meanwhile the man in the dock stared straight ahead without speaking as he digested the outcome.

Appearing for the prosecution, barrister Sinead Gleeson confirmed the injured party had agreed that reporting restrictions should be lifted to allow the offender to be named in press reports, so long as her own identity was not revealed.

The devastation caused by the child sex abuse was laid bare in a victim impact statement read out at Wexford Circuit Court.

The woman molested as a six year old by Nigel Buckley is now in her 30s and a married lady.

But the enduring vividness in her mind of the incident which violated her childhood came across strongly from the witness box.

“All the hours of counselling I have had to help me process the trauma,” she stated. ‘All the hours of crying down the phone to friends. All the fraught hours of speaking to my parents about it and seeing the pain in their faces any time I brought it up, because it is so hard for them to deal with it too.

“There is not one part of my life that the sexual abuse has not affected. It happened 29 years ago and I still deal with the effects of it every single day. Every time I hear a news article about a sexual assault, I am reminded of the abuse I endured when I was six years old. During intimacy I have to block out the intrusive thoughts and flashbacks I suffer as a result of the abuse. To this day I still have a fear of every male in my life…I feel like I can never let my guard down fully or trust anyone fully and I don’t think that will ever change.

“I worried that anyone who was nice to me could suddenly turn and carry out some heinous crime. Because I didn’t know who I could truly trust, I started to feel very alone.”

In the statement, the woman spoke of the stress engendered by the possibility of meeting Nigel Buckley again and of how her state of mind worsened during her teenage years: “The older I got the more I understood the true horror of what Nigel had done to me…I felt like my life was over. I felt like Nigel had cursed me, that I was damaged beyond repair and that the only way out was suicide. I started to self-harm. Scratching my arms with safety pins until I bled made me feel that I could release some of the pain I was going through.’

She paid moving tribute to the classmates who helped her pull through some of the dark days: “I confided in some school friends about the abuse. They were an amazing pillar of strength and support…I started attending counselling at the rape crisis centre when I was 17. I don’t think I would still be alive today if it weren’t for those counsellors. They helped me to drag myself out of the dark hole I was drowning in.”

Nevertheless, the abuse “has continued to impact my adult life on a daily basis…Thanks to the love and support of my husband, my family and the counsellors, I was able to work through this, and build up the strength to finally make my statement to the guards.

“Nigel took a part of me away, and I can never get that back. He preyed upon my innocence. He manipulated me, abused my trust, and made my whole world feel unsafe. He stole my childhood.”