A man has consented to the Probation Service being allowed to notify any future partners of his coercive control conviction as he was jailed for 12 months. The middle-aged man, who cannot be named on the directions of the judge, pleaded guilty last month at the Central Criminal Court in Cork to a single count of coercive control of his wife between January 1st, 2019, and September 8th, 2020.On Wednesday, Judge Siobhan Lankford noted that coercive control carries a maximum sentence of five years and said she agreed with the Director of Public Prosecutions that the offending fell into the midrange of sentencing for such offences as the accused had voluntarily moved out of the family home.She set a headline sentence of 30 months but noted the man had pleaded guilty and reduced it by eight months. She reduced it by another four months in light of the mitigating factor that he had a good relationship with the couple’s children.That left the man with an 18-month term to serve but the judge said she would suspend the last six months on a number of conditions. These included that he agree to undergo an intimate partner violence assessment and address the issue of victim empathy deficit, which was identified in a probation report.She made it a specific condition of the six-month suspension that he would notify the Probation Service if he entered into a new relationship and give his consent to the Probation Service to notify any future intimate partner of his coercive control conviction.The man agreed to the conditions which came after the judge noted a probation report had found that while the man had self-referred to the therapy group, Men Overcoming Violent Emotion, he initially had a limited insight into the impact of his offending.She acknowledged he now had a developing understanding of the impact of his offending but noted the Probation Service found he remained at a high risk of physical intimate partner violence. This was why she putting the notification condition on his suspended part of the sentence.Lankford had earlier recapped on the evidence of Det Garda Raelleen Bell of the Kerry Protective Services Unit that the couple had married in 2004. However, the woman quickly noticed he had a vicious temper and he did not want her to have any friends unless he approved of them.He once asked her if she would go to bed with singer Jon Bon Jovi and when she said she would, he became angry and ignored her for a week while insisting on them having regular and frequent sex even when she didn’t want to. On another occasion when they went to Puck Fair in Killorglin at his insistence even though it was her birthday, he pushed her against the banister in the accommodation where they were staying, grabbed her by the throat and called her “an ungrateful c**t”.On another occasion in Ardfert, he hit in her the face and although he apologised the following day for his action, he told her she had driven him to hit her. The woman ended up apologising for his behaviour towards her as he made her feel it was always her fault.He had serious anger issues as well as an alcohol problem and although she asked him to give up drink, which he did for period, he began drinking again on a family holiday. He got very abusive when he had drink taken, regularly calling her a c**t in front of their children.The woman, who is now separated from the man, told the court in her victim impact statement that “the constant critical and demeaning running commentary on everything I did and the name-calling” had chipped away at “my confidence, individuality and ability to think for myself”.She said when her daughter stopped coming home from college, it “contributed even more to the isolation he had created for me – he told me everyone was using me, but it was him that was using me – I couldn’t speak my own mind – I was trained into being compliant from the start”.The woman told how she had been in counselling since the couple separated in 2020. She had asked her counsellor if she would ever get her old self back, “meaning the happy, smiling, glass half full, loving, carefree trusting person” only for the counsellor to tell her she would not.“I was in shock and angry at being told I would never get my old self back . . . but then I realised I would have to accept that I will never be the same and I didn’t want my old self back – I wanted to learn from the past and become a stronger person,” she said.