A 55-YEAR-OLD Limerick man who believed he was sending naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl was given a suspended sentence after it emerged he was actually messaging an adult member of a group that exposes paedophiles.
Martin Geraghty was before the court with an address at an apartment at Sexton Street in Limerick City, but who no longer resides at this address, was exposed by members of a so-called ‘paedophile hunters’ group called “Child Protection Awareness (CPA)”.
Members of the CPA arrived at his apartment and live-streamed their encounter which was viewed by almost 240,000 people and shared online over 2,400 times.
Evidence was that Geraghty had engaged in a two-month text conversation with what he thought was a 13-year-old girl, but was actually a decoy adult from CPA.
He was given a 12-month suspended sentence by Judge Tom O’Donnell after pleading guilty before Limerick Circuit Criminal Court on November 21 to one count of using information technology and communication technology to facilitate the sexual exploitation of a child by sending sexually explicit material to a child.
Detective Inspector Vincent Brick, Garda Protective Services Bureau, Henry Street Garda Station, who led the Garda investigation, told the court that the 55-year-old sent the decoy sexually explicit naked pictures of himself.
Geraghty gave the decoy his name and address and asked the ‘girl’ to visit him at his apartment on Easter Sunday, 2018, where he would have a chocolate Easter egg waiting for her.
When the man opened the door of the apartment block on Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018, believing it was the girl, he was met by CPA members who streamed the interaction live on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
At the time, he was residing in an apartment which is situated across the street from a national school.
He had told the decoy in their text conversations that, after taking showers, he loved to walk around the apartment naked to dry himself.
He no longer lives at the Sexton Street apartment in Limerick City, and is thought to now be living in County Clare.
He had two previous convictions before judge Tom O’Donnell, Limerick Circuit Criminal Court on February 9, 2022, including one conviction for possession of around 200 indecent images and videos of children on February 25, 2015, and another for selling, distributing, or advertising the same indecent material on the same date.
For these offences, Geraghty was sentenced to two and half years in prison, which was fully suspended, and he was placed on a sex offenders register for five years.
Geraghty came on the Garda radar for these offences when his accessing of indecent material involving children online was flagged by international law enforcement.
He was made aware very early in the conversation with the adult decoy that he was conversing with what he believed to be a 13-year old girl.
Speaking after the sentencing hearing, a source familiar with the case warned: “These guys are actively out there, actively seeking to engage with children, and there’s evidence there to say these type of individuals are attempting to use information technology to engage with what they believe to be a child in order to groom children and sexually exploit them.”
“The tone of the conversation between him (Geraghty) and the decoy escalated quite quickly, and within the first four or five lines of their first conversation he is getting quite graphic.”
