A former garda who abused and terrorised the mother of his child has been jailed for four years and nine months.

Paul Moody, 46, pleaded guilty to harassing his then partner, sending her abusive messages and threatening to send intimate images to her employer.

Moody had carried out his campaign of terror on his victim before his later attacks on another woman called Nicola Hanney, for which he has already served a three-year sentence.

Moody, formerly of St Raphael’s Manor, Celbridge, Co. Kildare, pleaded guilty to harassment and coercive control.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard this offending took place on dates between March 2016 and November 2017. A charge of demanding money with menace was also taken into consideration.

Moody’s offending continued while the woman was in hospital pregnant, and after the birth of their child. Their relationship ended in early 2017.

On March 4, 2016, Moody sent the woman messages, including one where he called her a ‘homewrecker’ and said: ‘Do us all a favour, let nature take its course.’

He also messaged her to say, ‘I hope you bleed out and die you c***’ and, ‘I hope you lose [the baby] and die in the process for your lies and carry on’.

Moody had been jailed in 2022 for three years and three months after pleading guilty to a charge of coercion of Ms Hanney.

The court heard he then engaged in a four-year campaign of harassment, threats, assaults and coercive control of Ms Hanney, who he was in a relationship with after his split from this woman.

‘If someone had listened in 2017, Nicola would have been spared,’ the woman said. This injured party went to Garda watchdog GSOC in December 2017 and made a statement in March 2018 after the investigation started, forwarding a large amount of material.

She didn’t receive updates until October 2020 when GSOC told her Moody had been invited for interview the previous July, but didn’t attend as he was on stress leave.

Letters from GSOC relating to the injured party’s complaint were found when Moody’s home was searched in relation to the investigation into his conduct against Ms Hanney.

Detective Sergeant Maria Cassells of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI) said this was the first time the investigation became aware of the woman’s allegations.

In 2022, she asked the NBCI to take over her complaint. In her victim impact statement, she said she was ‘met with silence’ after complaining to GSOC.

The woman said a welfare call from GSOC on the day Moody was sentenced in 2022 was like a ‘sledgehammer’.

She said the ‘neglect’ of her complaint prolonged her trauma. She also said Moody took ‘far more than years’ from her, including ‘trust’ and ‘peace’.

In the statement read to the court by Fiona McGowan BL, prosecuting, the woman said she was ‘subjected to a level of abuse which altered the course of my life’.

‘He didn’t need to hit me to cause harm,’ she said, adding that the threats were relentless. She described a night where Moody destroyed the nursery, then ‘paced with a knife like a man possessed’.

Imposing sentence, Judge Martin Nolan noted the offending was ‘prolonged’ and ‘extreme’. He said the harassment and abuse was ‘extremely personal, insulting and very undermining’.

He noted the court sentenced Moody in 2022 for similar offending. He said the court accepted that it must try to envision what global sentence would have been imposed if both cases had been dealt with together.

The judge noted the guilty plea and that there were ‘other small factors in mitigation’.

He handed Moody a six-year sentence with the final 15 months suspended on strict conditions, noting the global sentence for all offending would have been in the region of eight years.

He made an order that Moody should have no contact with the woman, her family or friends for 20 years, and backdated the sentence to December 2024.