A WEST Cork man has been remanded in custody for sentence after he was convicted of sexually assaulting six young boys when he was observed hugging them in a fast food outlet by a psychotherapist who became alarmed and contacted gardaÍ.

Daniel Connolly (45) of Arndathrush, Glengarriff, had denied eight counts of sexually assaulting the boys, who were aged between six and eleven years of age, on three separate dates in August and September 2023 at a McDonald’s outlet in Cork city.

But the jury at Cork Circuit Criminal Court unanimously convicted him on seven of the eight counts after three hours and twenty minutes of deliberation before finding him guilty of the eighth count by a 10-2 majority verdict some ten minutes later.

During the five-day trial the jury heard gardaí were contacted by psychotherapist Karen Martin who had noticed Connolly with the children while with her nieces and nephews at McDonald’s at around 6pm on September 23rd 2023.

Ms Martin said: ‘My attention was brought to a man over to my left with five boys around him. I was struck by the five boys – they were really quiet. He kept continuously rubbing the head of one of the boys. It was unnatural. I felt sick looking at him.

‘I have a boy myself – there is no way a boy would let you rub him for that period of time. It did not look right… One of the boys came over and slapped his leg and said, ‘I don’t like you, I don’t like you’. And I found that strange.’

She was also ‘struck by how meek, quiet and passive he (the boy) was’ and she was alarmed when the man took the boys to the toilet where they stayed for five to ten minutes before returning to the dining area.

Garda obtained CCTV footage and were able to identify the boys with Connolly as coming from three different families. They later spoke to their mothers who confirmed they had first met Connolly with another woman whom they knew.

One mother told the court Connolly used to call to the area where they lived and collect the boys after he bought them a football and he used to bring them to a McDonalds in the area.

She said that Connolly contacted the boys on Snapchat and one of the boys had showed him where they lived. She confirmed that Connolly had also taken the boys swimming five or six times.

‘They never went (with him) on their own, they would go as a group,’ said the woman, adding that any time she rang Connolly, he would answer immediately and usually would drop them back within an hour.

Another mother told the court that she too met Connolly, whom she knew as Dan, for the first time when he was with another woman and he took them and their children to McDonalds where he bought them meals and spoke to the children about soccer.

Det Garda Paul Cogan of the Garda Protective Services Unit said Connolly admitted taking the boys to McDonalds, a swimming pool and Fitzgerald’s Park but denied being a paedophile or wanting to sexually exploit them and said he only hugged them because they hugged him.

 Prosecution barrister Paula McCarthy BL told the jury that they had seen video evidence from McDonalds of Connolly kissing one boy on the head and in two cases of him patting a boy on the buttocks and that there didn’t have to be touching of private parts for indecency to occur.

Ms McCarthy said: “He tells you these children are his friends - He is a man in his 40s. They are ten. He never goes into the family homes. I say it amounted to sexual assault. It is prolonged and overly tactile with children he had only met.”

Defence counsel Ray Boland SC said that maybe Ms Martin who works with the Rape Crisis Centre might have been hyper-vigilant, but nobody else noticed anything wrong. He said if someone was going to sexually assault children it would be extraordinary to do it in a busy public place where there was CCTV.

Judge Helen Boyle granted free legal aid to obtain a psychologist’s report on Connolly and she ordered a prison governor’s report before she remanded him in custody for sentence on June 26th.