Teacher who preyed on schoolgirl over Instagram jailed – RTE

A secondary school teacher who preyed on a vulnerable young schoolgirl by engaging in sexually explicit conversations with her on Instagram over a 12-month period has been given a three-year jail sentence with the final two years suspended. The teacher, John Murphy, 42, a married father-of-one from Ferncourt Crescent, Ballycullen in Dublin had pleaded guilty to a charge of the sexual exploitation of the then 15-year-old victim on dates between June 2017 and June 2018. The Galway native, who was a maths and science teacher at a school in Tallaght at the time of the offence, also pleaded guilty to a separate charge of the possession of child pornography between December 2007 and December 2010. A sitting of Wicklow Circuit Criminal Court had previously heard Murphy, who resigned from his teaching job in 2022, had during text exchanges with the girl on Instagram asked her for naked pictures of herself and told her that he wanted to be the one to take her virginity. While no images of the girl were found on Murphy’s computer, she told gardaí that she had sent images of her in her underwear to the accused. At a sentence hearing today, Judge Corman Quinn said
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