Court: Retired teacher had indecent images of teenage girls

Sentencing 76-year-old Charles Beggs at Craigavon Crown Court, Judge Roseanne McCormick QC told him that while she could impose a three month jail sentence such a short sentence “clearly lacks any scope for rehabilitation.”

With Beggs appearing at court by videolink from the offices of Sheridan and Leonard solicitors, the judge asked him directly if he was willingly to undergo a two year probation order and to comply with its conditions and he agreed.

Last month Beggs, a former teacher at De la Salle in west Belfast and who is from the Feumore Road in Lisburn, pleaded guilty to 14 of the 15 charges of making indecent images of children on dates between 5 February 2004 and 20 July 2016.

Opening the facts if the case today prosecuting lawyer Joseph Murphy told the court that armed with the intelligence that someone in Beggs’ home had been searching for indecent images, officers from the Child Internet Protection Team searched it in July 2016. They seized a computer tower and a laptop which were found to contain 233 indecent images ranging across all three categories.

Mr Murphy revealed that the laptop was in fact “registered to Edmund Rice College in Glengormley with the user named as the North Eastern Education Library Board but during police interviews, Beggs explained he had taken the machine into the school when working there as a substitute teacher.

Defence counsel Patrick Taylor said the case had been “weighing heavily” on the retired teacher who has now “lost his reputation and his good name.”

He submitted that while it was obviously a serious case, “it was a relatively small amount of images” and that his wife was standing by him.

As well as the probation order, the judge also imposed a five year sexual offences Prevention Order and told Beggs he would have to sign the police sex offenders register for five years.