Latest news with #Eircom
Irish Daily Mirror
17 hours ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
Man caught with haul of child abuse and anime images narrowly avoids jail
A Co Donegal man caught with a haul of child sex abuse and anime images on a computer hard-drive at his home has avoided going to jail. John Sweeney, 60, appeared at Letterkenny Circuit Court where he pleaded guilty to possession of the images when his house at Dore, Bunbeg was raided by Gardai on July 24, 2019. Detective Garda Enda Jennings and Michelle Kelly were acting on information forwarded by the Garda National Protective Services Bureau. It followed information they received that a user had uploaded child pornography from an Eircom internet account. The account was traced to John Sweeney whose Eircom account had been activated on April 11, 2014. Gardai visited the house and seized three mobile phones as well as a hard-drive. All the images including a total of 139 child abuse images and 94 anime images were found on the computer hard-drive. Sweeney was arrested, taken to Milford Garda Station and made full admissions. Detective Garda Enda Jennings told the court that the accused man had cooperated and told Gardai he had been going through a difficult time and was drinking heavily at the time. The court was further told that Sweeney lived alone at the address and had no previous convictions. Barrister for the accused, Ms Patricia McLaughlin, SC, said her client had given all his PIN numbers to Gardai and had cooperated fully and made admissions at the scene. However, because of a backlog in investigating such cases around the country at the time, it wasn't until November 2023 that a plea could be made. A number of the One in Four counselling service was given to Sweeney and he went about getting counselling during that time. Ms McLaughlin said it was not the case that her client shared any of the images and had no great sophisticated knowledge of computers but was accessing adult pornography over a period of time. Child pornography then began to pop up and the accused man then developed some curiosity on this, Ms McLaughlin added. Sweeney had been in a relationship for several years but this ended and he began to drink and this led to a deterioration in his mental health. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 2015 but had recovered from this and he had a good work history up until this and had no previous convictions. A probation report dated May 29, 2025, said Sweeney was of a low risk of reoffending but there were some concerns for him because of his isolation and that he has limited support within the community. The report said Sweeney had been spending hours online going down a rabbit hole of adult pornography and then further material at a time when he was leading a chaotic lifestyle, suffering from emotional distress and abusing alcohol. However, the probation service also noted that he has expressed remorse and is aware that the images are wrong and was happy to go under the supervision of the probation services. Community service was not recommended for Sweeney because of his medical issues but he continues to go down the path of counselling, the probation report added. Ms McLaughlin added that Sweeney is a man of previous good character who has had the offence hanging over him for the past five years, that he lives in a small, local community and that he has taken steps towards rehabilitation. She asked Judge John Aylmer to consider dealing with the offence by way of a non-custodial sentence considering the overall amount of images, the amount of time the accused man had the images in his possession which was estimated to be two months and how he came upon the images. She said her client had had an "unsophisticated fall into child porn." Judge Aylmer said that on the very early plea and the number of images involved, he placed the offence at the lower end of the scale and one which merited a sentence of two years before mitigation. In mitigation, the Judge said Sweeney had no previous convictions, had cooperated fully with Gardai and had entered an early plea. He also noted that five years had elapsed since his arrest and appearing in court, that the case had been hanging over Sweeney, that he had availed of rehab and that he was assessed as being of a low risk of reoffending. For all of these factors as well as his remorse and shame, Judge Aylmer reduced the sentence to one of 18 months in prison. He added that the question then arises that if the court might suspend all or part of that sentence and that he accepted the advance by Sweeney's barrister, Ms McLaughlin, that there were similarities to another case, the McGinty case. Ms McLaughlin said that it was similar in many ways to the McGinty case because of the cooperation, the lack of previous convictions, the low risk of reoffending, the engagement in rehab as well as the fact that the case has hung over the accused for so long. Judge Aylmer agreed that this was one of those unusual cases where the court can suspend the entirety of the 18 months sentence and ordered Sweeney to go under the supervision of the probation services.
Sunday World
a day ago
- Health
- Sunday World
Man caught with haul of child sex abuse images on hard-drive avoids jail
John Sweeney, 60, appeared at Letterkenny Circuit Court where he pleaded guilty to possession of the images when his house at Dore, Bunbeg was raided by Gardai on July 24th, 2019 A Co Donegal man caught with a haul of child sex abuse and anime images on a computer hard-drive at his home has avoided going to jail. John Sweeney, 60, appeared at Letterkenny Circuit Court where he pleaded guilty to possession of the images when his house at Dore, Bunbeg was raided by Gardai on July 24th, 2019. Detective Garda Enda Jennings and Michelle Kelly were acting on information forwarded by the Garda National Protective Services Bureau. It followed information they received that a user had uploaded child pornography from an Eircom internet account. The account was traced to John Sweeney whose Eircom account had been activated on April 11th, 2014. Gardai visited the house and seized three mobile phones as well as a hard-drive. All the images including a total of 139 child abuse images and 94 anime images were found on the computer hard-drive. Sweeney was arrested, taken to Milford Garda Station and made full admissions. Detective Garda Enda Jennings told the court that the accused man had cooperated and told Gardai he had been going through a difficult time and was drinking heavily at the time. The court was further told that Sweeney lived alone at the address and had no previous convictions. Barrister for the accused, Ms Patricia McLaughlin, SC, said her client had given all his PIN numbers to Gardai and had cooperated fully and made admissions at the scene. However, because of a backlog in investigating such cases around the country at the time, it wasn't until November 2023 that a plea could be made. A number of the One in Four counselling service was given to Sweeney and he went about getting counselling during that time. Ms McLaughlin said it was not the case that her client shared any of the images and had no great sophisticated knowledge of computers but was accessing adult pornography over a period of time. Child pornography then began to pop up and the accused man then developed some curiosity on this, Ms McLaughlin added. John Sweeney leaving Letterkenny Circuit Court. (North West Newspix) News in 90 June 4th Sweeney had been in a relationship for several years but this ended and he began to drink and this led to a deterioration in his mental health. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 2015 but had recovered from this and he had a good work history up until this and had no previous convictions. A probation report dated May 29th, 2025, said Sweeney was of a low risk of reoffending but there were some concerns for him because of his isolation and that he has limited support within the community. The report said Sweeney had been spending hours online going down a rabbit hole of adult pornography and then further material at a time when he was leading a chaotic lifestyle, suffering from emotional distress and abusing alcohol. However, the probation service also noted that he has expressed remorse and is aware that the images are wrong and was happy to go under the supervision of the probation services. Community service was not recommended for Sweeney because of his medical issues but he continues to go down the path of counselling, the probation report added. Ms McLaughlin added that Sweeney is a man of previous good character who has had the offence hanging over him for the past five years, that he lives in a small, local community and that he has taken steps towards rehabilitation. She asked Judge John Aylmer to consider dealing with the offence by way of a non-custodial sentence considering the overall amount of images, the amount of time the accused man had the images in his possession which was estimated to be two months and how he came upon the images. She said her client had had an "unsophisticated fall into child porn." Judge Aylmer said that on the very early plea and the number of images involved, he placed the offence at the lower end of the scale and one which merited a sentence of two years before mitigation. In mitigation, the Judge said Sweeney had no previous convictions, had cooperated fully with Gardai and had entered an early plea. He also noted that five years had elapsed since his arrest and appearing in court, that the case had been hanging over Sweeney, that he had availed of rehab and that he was assessed as being of a low risk of reoffending. For all of these factors as well as his remorse and shame, Judge Aylmer reduced the sentence to one of 18 months in prison. He added that the question then arises that if the court might suspend all or part of that sentence and that he accepted the advance by Sweeney's barrister, Ms McLaughlin, that there were similarities to another case, the McGinty case. Ms McLaughlin said that it was similar in many ways to the McGinty case because of the cooperation, the lack of previous convictions, the low risk of reoffending, the engagement in rehab as well as the fact that the case has hung over the accused for so long. Judge Aylmer agreed that this was one of those unusual cases where the court can suspend the entirety of the 18 months sentence and ordered Sweeney to go under the supervision of the probation services.
Irish Examiner
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Colin Sheridan: A process lies behind every perfection, it's why we jump through hoops
"For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun." — John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, The East of Eden Letters. I have seen the band Bon Iver many, many times. So many times, you could say I discovered them long before they became de rigueur for deep-thinking empaths with a penchant for lumberjack shirts. Yeah, I was there when Justin Vernon — the band's creative north-star — lived above an Eircom store off Eyre Square in Galway way back in 2001. He does not know it, but I'm pretty sure we chased the same girls, and certainly locked eyes more than once over a Taco fries in the wee hours outside Abrakebabra. I might even have been in Taaffe's the night he met Emma, the girl who broke his heart so bad he disappeared to the woods to write one of the greatest break-up albums of all time, For Emma, Forever Ago. Bottom line, I was there from the start — from before the start — so when Vernon and his band come to town, I'm there, the guy at the back who catches his eye during the encore and raises a glass to his tortured genius. I quietly sneer at his new fans — hipster dilettantes, all — and head for the exit early, content that I've kept up my end of a non-existent relationship. 'You've done good, kid,' I say aloud to myself, to him, to nobody. And indeed, he has. His latest album, Sable, Fable recently dropped to universal acclaim. One track in particular — 'Speyside' — provided the soundtrack to what was an incredibly brutal few months at the back end of 2024, as the world seemed to implode from within. One lyric hung like the perfume of an ex on a sweater you never want to wash: - 'As I fill my book/what a waste of wood/nothing's really happened like I thought it would.' Yeah, there's pain and there's poetic pain and then there's Bon Iver's music. A whole different kind of pain, all the more beautiful for it. Obsession with process One thing I've come to learn to love from Vernon is devotion to process. At a concert a few years ago, my eye was drawn to the side of the stage before the main event, and a pair of screens depicting a rather unremarkable scene; a man — maybe Vernon, maybe not — shooting a basketball in a backyard. In the corner of the screen was the shot count. Filmed in real time, the footage was set against a backdrop of daylight fading to evening, before receding to nightfall, the shooter backlit against a streetlight. The scene continued for almost half an hour before Vernon took to the stage with his band, scored by nothing but the expectant din of the thousands present. Understanding Vernon's obsession with process, I understood this was not absentminded filler, but a fable all by itself. The shooter was one of us, clearly amateur and imperfect in his motion; but, watching him as the sun set was to bear silent witness to mundane beauty; a silhouetted man clearly passionate about his own process, sometimes missing, often scoring, perpetually striving to be better. All the while nobody in the arena paid any attention. Watching it was the perfect prelude to what was to follow. Vernon, like the anonymous man with the basketball shooting hoops, has always been one of us, just set apart by a God-given talent that has often threatened to suffocate him A friend recently gifted me a copy John Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel. Every working day for ten months in 1951, Steinbeck wrote a note to his friend and editor Pascal Covici to warm up. It was a way — he later said — to get his writing brain in shape 'to pitch a good game.' Well, it worked, as he got his best book out of it. While one wonders what a contemporary version of that journal might look like — 'Dear Pascal. Hit snooze button five times. Woke late. Scrolled X. Deleted X. Downloaded TikTok. Deleted TikTok. Bought dog toys on AliExpress. Don't have dog. Tried to buy dog online. Can't. Looked out window. No writing today. Best, JS' —the gift has proved the perfect accompaniment to my own doomed pursuit of perfection. If for no other reason, then to remind that we all want the same thing. Whether we write, read, or draft solicitors' letters for a living, each one of us engages in that thing we call 'process.' Artists — successful artists like Vernon — can often give the act a gravitas that makes it alien because, well, they're geniuses. But — and I think this is what I understood from the man with the basketball — regardless of talent or audience or ovations — most of our working life is spent underneath a streetlight shooting threes, over and over again. Maybe, 389 shots in, we discover something. And that is why we keep going.
Irish Times
28-04-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
The Eircom shares debacle: ‘I spent €5,000. They are now worth less than €500′
'Any thoughts on Eircom/Vodafone shares,' begins a mail from Daniel, a reader whose family 'bought a small amount of shares on issue'. He says that they have turned out to be a 'nuisance' – a kind word to describe them. He says there are a nuisance because his family continue to 'get more paper than the tiny dividends are worth. I am pretty sure the cost of selling them outweighs the benefit and so the post and pennies continue intermittently.' He reckons his family are 'not alone in having a bad aftertaste of Eircom'. READ MORE He is right on the money about what must rank as one of the biggest financial scandals to hit this country in the past 50 years – and there have been many such scandals. [ Rachael English: 'After Eircom I decided I should stay away from things I know nothing about' Opens in new window ] If you don't remember exactly what happened, don't worry, we have you covered. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Ireland had one of the worst telecoms systems in Europe. People were left on waiting lists for landline installation for months, if not years, and when those fabled points of connection were eventually installed, the cost of making calls was high. People were also expected to pay the equivalent of about €400 in line rental charges a year. It was almost as expensive as leaving the immersion on. Things began to change, slowly at first, in the 1980s when we didn't have a shilling to our name. In 1983 the P&T (Posts & Telegraphs) became Telecom Éireann and a rapid modernisation programme began with the network morphing from one of the worst analogue systems in Europe to one of the more advanced digital ones before the end of the decade. Much of the improvement was prompted by a recognition in government circles that if Ireland wanted to attract foreign direct investment from start-ups such as Microsoft and Apple, it would need to have the infrastructure in place. Telecom Éireann started strongly and its mobile arm, Eircell, started growing from 1986 – although very slowly at first. In the early 1990s it was the only mobile phone operator in Ireland and served its small customer base with the 088 prefix. Fast-forward to the end of the 1990s when the Celtic Tiger was growling and Telecom Éireann was suddenly hugely profitable. The shares are still worth considerably less to the poor unfortunates who drank the Kool-Aid (having been effectively force-fed the stuff by various arms of the State) It was so profitable that Cable and Wireless – a UK company – wanted to buy it. That prompted a high-profile anti-privatisation campaign led by the unions at the company, which ran with slogans such as 'Don't let the fat cats get their claws on telecom' and 'If they privatise telecom, who gains? The fat cats.' The C&W fat cats scarpered but a decision was taken to privatise Telecom Éireann regardless. Guess what? The only ones to win were some very fat cats. It was a wild ride before that. About three million people on the Electoral Register were sent letters detailing how they could play the stock market and buy shares (in a company they already owned, but you probably know that already). Banks and credit unions were falling over themselves to lend people money to buy those shares. The money they were lending wasn't free, and if they were charging rates of interest of about 10 per cent it meant that, for such a transaction to make any sense, the share price would have to climb by at least that percentage over the first 12 months. Such details were overlooked by many of the nearly 600,000 people who spent an average of about £7,000 (more than €15,000 in today's money) on July 8th, 1999. That was the day the company suddenly known as Eircom was floated on the London, New York and Dublin stock exchanges at a price of £3.07. More than €6 billion was raised by the sale and much of it was invested in a State pension fund (which would ultimately be plundered during the crash). Things quickly started to go south for the shareholders who did not sell quickly enough. Within a year the company had lost more than a third of its value, and management had sold the family silver in the form of Eircell to Vodafone. There was then leveraged buyout by a Tony O'Reilly -led consortium that saw the company burdened with a huge amount of debt, and another takeover by Australian financiers Babcock and Brown, which saw more debt added to the company's balance sheet and its value fall precipitously. Less than 15 years after the company floated and was valued at more than €6 billion, it was in the High Court seeking examinership and valued at – effectively – nothing. While Pricewatch has not written about Telecom Éireann or Eircom before, our colleague Dominic Coyle has written about it on many occasions and frequently does some dizzyingly complicated calculations to explain how much the Eircom shares that were converted into Vodafone shares are now worth and what the financial impact of selling them might be. [ I want to sell my late wife's Vodafone shares, but I'm at a loss finding the original value Opens in new window ] We won't revisit that here but the bottom line is that the Vodafone shares that were once Eircom shares are still worth considerably less to the poor unfortunates who drank the Kool-Aid (having been effectively force-fed the stuff by various arms of the State) and they are all still much worse off than had they not bought the shares in the first place. Readers' experiences of Eircom shares After reading Daniel's mail we were curious about the experience of others. We took to X and asked users if they had bought shares and if they had made or lost money on the endeavour. Some people who responded did make money – but not many. 'I bought £300 worth or whatever the lowest amount was and lost on them, sold when they transferred to Vodafone, worth very little,' writes Deirdre. 'A businessman up at director level borrowed money to invest in them and sold them quickly. He's the only person I knew who profited from them.' Donagh also 'bought and lost. As far as I recall the only people who made money were the ones that sold on the day of issue'. Terry bought a €1,000 worth 'and eventually sold them for €300. What a sham that was'. 'A lot of people sold on day one and made money. I wasn't one of them though,' writes Fionbarra. 'Cut my losses eventually. Win some, lose some.' 'My late father bought for his and my mam's future retirement,' writes Karen. 'And he lost it all, like so many. It was so sad.' 'I spent €5000 and they are now worth less than €500,' says Maura. Michael: 'After discovering I'd been had, I never did anything with them. When they converted to Vodafone shares, never cashed any of the €1.20 dividend cheques, never read the annual report, or voted the directors (in or out) by proxy, or attended the London agm. Shirt long lost.' Michael seems to be in the same position as Daniel, which takes us to his closing idea of setting something up some kind of altruistic scheme that would allow people to dispense with the shares they still have in a tax-efficient way with the money pooled and used for a charitable cause. At least that way something good – even if it was something small – could come out of the shambles. But just how such an idea might be implemented is beyond the power of Pricewatch so, instead, we'll just put it out there and maybe someone smarter than us could come up with a plan?
