RAYMOND Groarke is no stranger to tales of illicit sex, but when the Galway judge was asked last week to decide the fate of a 19-year-old boy facing a year in prison for having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend, he retreated to his chambers to reflect.

Groarke, an experienced circuit court judge who has presided over rape and child sex-abuse cases, appeared to be at a loss as to how to deal with the teenage lovers, now engaged and living together with their 10-month-old son.

Paul McGettigan, the lawyer representing the 19-year-old in an appeal against a year-long sentence imposed by the district court for unlawful carnal knowledge of an underage girl, said it was “most unusual”.

The couple had been dating for about five months when the girl, a straight-A Junior Cert student, invited her boyfriend to help her baby-sit. She brought the accused to a bedroom where she invited him to have sex. Lying about her age, she told him she was 16. It’s the average age at which Irish teens begin having sex, but it is one year too early according to Ireland’s age of consent laws.

In defiance of the law, their affair thrived. But last May when the girl discovered she was pregnant, her mother made a complaint of statutory rape to the gardai. The girl was forced to make a statement.

The accusation — later retracted by the girl’s mother — led to the 19-year-old being convicted of statutory rape at Tuam district court. But last week when the now-proud grandmother implored Groarke not to send her prospective son-in-law to jail, she received short shrift.

“Even though he raped your daughter, in law?” asked the judge, who said the girl was a “conspirator”, a willing party in the illegal sexual acts.

“Why is she referred to as the injured party?” wondered Groarke, as he interrogated Michael O’Driscoll, a senior garda who was giving evidence. “Why had the gardai not sought advice from the director of public prosecutions to prosecute the girl for conspiracy? She was part of a conspiracy to commit an indictable crime, was she not?” McGettigan pleaded for leniency. The couple were still together, he said, it wasn’t a one-night stand. Underage sex is “rampant in any city or town” throughout Ireland, the boy’s lawyer said, and Irish society no longer wondered at it.

Perhaps, the lawyer suggested, the law should be changed to deal with the reality of consensual sex among Irish teenagers. “Perhaps,” retorted Groarke, “it is time courts started jailing young men who behave in this fashion and maybe young ladies too.”

BUT before Irish teenagers worry about being jailed for having sex with their peers, they can relax in the knowledge that peer-on-peer prosecutions are practically unheard of in Ireland. The case before Groarke is exceptional.

Ireland has the second-highest teenage-pregnancy rate in Europe; as many as 30% of Irish teenagers are sexually active and last year 49 teenagers under the age of 16 travelled to Britain for abortions.

“The law has no impact, it is there but it is being ignored,” said Carmel Wynne, author of Sex and Young People: The knowledge to guide the teenager in your life.

“There are no prosecutions of teenagers who have sex with each other. Children just say ‘so what?’ Gardai turn a blind eye to underage sex and will only interfere if a parent complains.”

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