A jury will resume its deliberations on Wednesday in the Central Criminal Court trial of a garda accused of raping his former wife and of child cruelty towards two of his daughters.The defendant (48) has pleaded not guilty to one count of child cruelty to his now 17-year-old daughter on dates between 2015 and 2024. He has also pleaded not guilty to two counts of raping his wife on dates in 2009 and 2021.He has further pleaded not guilty to two counts of child cruelty to his now 24-year-old daughter on unknown dates between 2007 and 2020. He also denies a charge of assault causing harm to this daughter on an unknown date in late 2021 to early 2022, after she had turned 18.The alleged offending took place at two locations in the northwest, where the family was living at the relevant times.The jury has heard that the defendant is a serving member of An Garda Síochána who is on suspension pending the outcome of this prosecution. He has no previous convictions.After being charged by Judge Sean Gillane, the jury began deliberations on Tuesday afternoon. They will resume their deliberations on Wednesday morning. In his closing speech, prosecution counsel Dominic McGinn said being a parent is not easy and that every parent makes mistakes and gets some things wrong from time to time. He said there is a dividing line between what is ill-treatment and what is reasonable chastisement and discipline and that it was a matter for them to decide if a line had been crossed by the accused.He said it is the State’s case that, taken together, the “overall behaviour” of the defendant amounts to “crossing that line”.“It wasn’t just somebody being a strict parent or exercising reasonable discipline,” he said.He said the former wife and daughters of the accused all gave consistent testimony of “violence in the home” and of there being a pervasive sense of anger all the time.“You can imagine the fears of someone who is married to a garda. How can she report something like this to people who are effectively colleagues of her husband?” counsel said. He said the fact the defendant was a garda was a real feature of the case, which the jury could consider when assessing the credibility of his former wife and her allegations.“There is no reason why any of them would have said any of these things if they weren’t true. You can be satisfied that all three are honest, reliable and truthful witnesses,” he said. Defence counsel James McGowan submitted that the witnesses were unreliable and the prosecution’s case was “simply incredible”.He said the allegation that his client is a rapist and capable of child cruelty was set against the background where his ex-partner, who alleges the rapes, “is happy” for the accused to have unsupervised access to the other younger children.He told the jury the complainant’s evidence was that she and the accused were in regular communication about these children, including up to the start of the trial to arrange childcare.He asked the jury to consider a letter written by the woman to his client in June 2021, when she moved herself and the children out of the family home.In the letter, the complainant tells the accused that he had not hit her, but he was “very controlling and volatile” and that she wanted out of the marriage and “can’t keep living this lie”.Counsel asked the jury to consider that there was no mention in this letter of any domestic violence involving the children and no mention of rape.McGowan said it was curious that the complainant needed her daughter’s journal to see if she witnessed any of the incidents of alleged child cruelty.“There is a lot of the parts of this story that don’t make sense and don’t add up,” he said.He told jurors that “you should have a doubt about everything you heard here and you should acquit if you do have that doubt”.The trial continues.