A former GAA club official in the North has been sentenced to 16 years in prison for what a judge called “a campaign of sexual offending” carried out against young males for almost 30 years.
Thomas McKenna (62), with an address at Maghaberry Prison, pleaded guilty to 162 sexual abuse offences that took place between 1989 and 2018, affecting 23 victims.
McKenna had been a club treasurer at Crossmaglen Rangers GAA in Co Armagh, as well as a postman and a director of the local credit union.
At Belfast Laganside Courthouse on Friday, Judge Patricia Smyth said that McKenna had used his position in the community to “groom and manipulate” his victims, some of whom were particularly vulnerable.
The judge said that the psychological harm McKenna inflicted on his victims was “immeasurable”.
“There is no sentence that this court can pass that will repair that damage,” she said.
She said that some of the offences were carried out in hotels when travelling with the club, in pubs and toilets in Northern Ireland and the Republic, as well as in his home and in the homes of some of his victims.
She said the fact that his offending only stopped when he was arrested was “a particularly serious concern”.
She said that some victims had written to her to speak about the effect the abuse had on their lives.
“A sense of guilt and shame permeates many of the accounts. Guilt that it happened,” she said.
“Young men tortured with the thought that they were somehow to blame, when in truth, they bear no responsibility.”
She spoke about the parents of the boys and men involved also as victims who had “entrusted their children to your care”.
“You manipulated those parents, just as you manipulated their children. You befriended them, disguising your true nature under a mask of respectability.”
She criticised McKenna’s approach to his defence by saying that every aspect of it “was an attempt to continue the psychological power games that you’d played for years”.
