A jury has found a married couple guilty of the female genital mutilation (FGM) of their daughter.
The couple both pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to one count of carrying out an act of FGM on a then one-year-old girl at an address in Dublin on September 16, 2016.
The 37-year-old man and 27-year-old woman also pleaded not guilty to one count of child cruelty on the same day.
They are both originally from an African nation but cannot be named to protect the identity of the child.
On the eighth day of the trial, the jury returned unanimous verdicts of guilty on all counts after almost three hours of deliberations.
Judge Elma Sheahan thanked the jury for their care and attention in a difficult case.
A bail hearing followed the jury verdict and is still in progress.
During the trial, the accused man said that on the morning of September 16, 2016, the family woke up at around 11am.
He said that he noticed that his daughter had a “dirty nappy” and asked his wife to clean her.
He said his daughter came back from the bathroom no longer wearing a nappy and he showed her a ball with lights on it.
He said his daughter ran backwards and he turned around.
The accused man said he heard his daughter crying and he picked her up to try to calm her.
He said his wife came out of the bathroom and said she saw something between her daughter's legs which he realised was blood.
Dr Sri Paran, the consultant surgeon who operated on the child, said that she was bleeding from just above where he would expect the clitoris to be and he observed that the clitoral head was absent.
Dr Paran said that the bleeding was “not planning on stopping any time soon”.
He said that had the bleeding not been stopped, by the following morning the child would have had difficulty breathing and would have gone into shock after around 20 hours.
Dr Deborah Hodes told the trial she helped to establish a clinic specialising in identifying and treating those suspected to have undergone FGM and to the best of her knowledge this is the only such clinic in the UK and Ireland.
She said she has probably seen around 80 cases of FGM.
Dr Hodes said that her observations of the child's injury were consistent with FGM.
She said that what she saw was consistent with the cutting and removal of tissue.
She said that the explanation that the child sustained the injury by falling on a toy does not fit with the clinical findings and it is not possible that falling backwards onto the toy would cause the level of damage.
Dr John Hoade, who works in the DNA section of Forensic Science Ireland as a scientist, said that he examined the child's toy found at the address.
“I found no blood on the toy,” Dr Hoade said.
