An Army private jailed this week for sex offences against a 13-year-old girl was not a member of a child-sex ring.

Garda Liam Feeney, who led the investigation that brought about the imprisonment of 34-year Kenneth McDonald, was asked by defence counsel Cormac O’Dulachain, SC, if there was a sex-ring.

Gda Feeney told Donegal Circuit Court that at one stage there were concerns that a ring was in operation but investigations established this was not the case.

“There was no ring”, he said.

McDonald – who resigned from the Army after 15 years last Friday – was put behind bars on Monday for two years and three months for sex assaults on the 13-year-old.

Judge Ray Fullam imposed three years in jail on the father of three but suspended nine months of the sentence.

McDonald, of Ernedale Heights, Ballyshannon, has also been placed on the sex offenders ’register. He was convicted by a jury of four counts of sexual assault on the girl on dates between June 1st and November 30th 2003. The offences occurred in his car near woodlands in south Donegal.

Judge Fullam said McDonald, who was 28 at the time, had taken advantage of the girl when she was legally incapable of consenting to sex because of her age. McDonald also knew at the time that she was effectively abandoned, without guidance and was “beginning on a life of promiscuity.” He added to her “degradation” for his own self-gratification.

The girl, who is now 19, told the trial earlier last month that she had full sex 57 times with 22 adult men when she was 13. She kept a diary of her encounters and a “period chart” to help her identify the father if she became pregnant.

The court heard that there are to be five other prosecutions.

Judge Fullam paid tribute to gardai and HSE personnel who looked after the girl during five years she was in care after the inquiry started.

The judge said that from the girl’s demeanour in court he recognised she was a different person to what she was six years ago. Her transformation came about due to the intervention of an “anonymous and right-minded person” who went to the gardai in November 2003.

The transformation was also due to the persistence and professionalism of the gardai and HSE whose joint efforts “ensured the girl saw the value of the truth and had the courage to tell it in all its wretched aspects.”

The court heard that McDonald’s wife Maggie is standing by him. She was in court as were other members of his family.

His victim was accompanied by a social worker. There was nobody from her family there.

Garda Feeney told the court that, at one stage of the investigation when McDonald went through a period of bad depression, firearms were taken with the co-operation of the Army from his house “for his own safety.”

Judge Fullam heard that when McDonald joined the Army he was following a family tradition as his father had also been a serving soldier. McDonald was based throughout his career at Finner Camp, a few kilometres from his home.

He served twice in the Lebanon. His voluntary resignation came in advance of a mandatory dismissal which would have followed his imprisonment.

His record in the Army varied from “fairly good” in the early years to “excellent” in the last few years. A letter from Army chaplain Fr Alan Ward, written to coincide with McDonald’s resignation, said he had progressed from an “aimless and dissolute” lifestyle to a “courteous and obliging individual” following his 2004 marriage and was now “a very different and better man than he was at the time of these contemptible events.”

(Reporter: Paddy Clancy)