One of the mitigating factors the judge considered in deciding how long George Gibney must spend in jail was that, as he put it, “there is no evidence of subsequent offending” after the 1980s. It was a macabre source of relief that the teenager the former national swim coach raped in Florida in 1991 was unable to be present in the courtroom to hear that. She has been in institutional psychiatric care for most of the years since gardaí informed her in 2002 that the DPP had instructed them not to charge Gibney for what he did to her, resulting in her pregnancy. She had been bracing herself to testify against him face-to-face in court. After the two gardaí left her home that night, she tried to kill herself.

In passing the 15½-year sentence on Monday, Judge Mícheál P O’Higgins was legally bound to deal only with the evidence adduced in the case of four women abused in the 1970s and 1980s and whose testimonies finally secured Gibney’s conviction nearly 60 years after his first known crimes against children. Gibney’s 1991 rape of the teenage swimmer in Florida was not part of that evidence.

Another mitigating factor the judge cited was that Gibney had “no previous convictions”. That certainly was not for want of his victims’ perseverance in pursuit of justice over 25 years.

Lorraine Kennedy was not in the courtroom either. Her daughter, Louise, attended with a photograph of her remarkable mother who died seven years ago. Lorraine was one of Gibney’s earliest victims. She was a little girl when she joined the Guinness swimming pool in Watling Street. The first time Gibney knelt in front of her and put his fingers inside her was in........

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