An 81-year-old retired schoolteacher who kept diaries recording his sexual abuse of some of his pupils has been jailed for a total of 15 years for oral and anal rape as well as sexual assaults on four underage boys over a number of years.Barra Connolly, a former teacher at Lismore CBS in Co Waterford had denied all the charges but was convicted by a jury at the Central Criminal Court, sitting in Waterford in February, of a total of 97 counts of sexual offences against the four victims, who were all aged 13 or 14 at the time.The jury found Connolly guilty of some 23 counts of Section 4 rape where he orally or anally raped his victims, 73 counts of sexual assault on them and one count of possession of child pornography at his house on Chapel Street in Lismore between 1997 and 2006.At the Central Criminal Court in Dublin on Thursday, Judge Melanie Greally recalled the evidence of Det Gda Patricia Lonergan of the Waterford Garda Protective Services Bureau as she gave a summary of the facts of the case before imposing sentence on Connolly.The judge recalled how Connolly, an English and history teacher, used the pretext of giving free grinds to lure the victims to his house where he provided them with soft drinks and cigarettes and showed them pornographic films as he groomed them before sexually abusing them.Connolly began abusing the boys in a particular room in his house and the judge recalled how each victim told how Connolly had a seating hierarchy in the room where he placed his favourite in a chair he called “the throne” before he began abusing them.She noted that Connolly also gave the boys keys to his house and that he abused three of the four boys on a weekly or monthly basis, giving them €100 a week while, in the case of one boy, the abuse went on for a four-year period between 2002 and 2006.The abuse came to light when one of Connolly’s victims told his partner in 2021 and reported it to An Garda Síochána, who searched Connolly’s house on October 22nd, 2023 and found 984 child porn video and still images showing “underage boys being exploited in the vilest way”.She recalled that during the search gardaí also recovered diaries in which Connolly had recorded his sexual activities with young boys in a mixture of Irish, Latin, French and Italian, using cryptic codes for various sexual activities with the boys.She noted Connolly had exercised his right to silence when he was arrested and questioned by gardaí after they searched his house. During the trial, he denied he was sexually attracted to young boys and that he had abused his victims as they alleged.The judge noted that there were a number of “egregious aggravating factors” to the case including the multiplicity and frequency of the offending, its prolonged nature and the breach of trust involved. She noted there was little by way of mitigation available to Connolly as he refused to accept the verdict of the jury and was not expressing any remorse. While he had nothing by way of previous convictions, the judge suggested this was negated by the harmful impact of his offending.She noted his age and the contents of a psychological assessment in which he expressed a fear of dying in prison. She imposed a structured sentence on each group of charges, with some tariffs to run concurrently but with the two longest terms of 7½ years to run consecutively, leaving Connolly with 15 years to serve backdated to when he went into custody in February.Prosecution counsel Conor O’Doherty said the four victims were keen for Connolly to be named once they weren’t identified, and the judge made such an order before commending the four for their detailed testimony. She wished them well in moving on with their lives.