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“Sex abuse card  played in vendetta,” jury told             23/6/14

The jury on the trial of Father John Angus Macdonald is due to go out and consider the evidence this afternoon.  

Macdonald, originally of South Uist, is alleged to have raped a nine-year-old girl, said to have happened when he was a young teenager in the 50s and 60s.

He also faces a charge of carrying out indecent practices on a young boy. A third accusation of repeated rape against the girl has been dropped.

In his closing speech to the jury,prosecutor David Taylor queried why, following a confrontation with Macdonald over the alleged abuse the woman did not “go the whole hog” and claim he confessed, if she just wanted to blacken his name.

Mr Taylor added: “I wonder why the accused has such a clear memory” of this meeting if it was just another discussion.

Similarly, if the man was “here to seek revenge,” he would have been keener to speak out and not have to be prompted over things, he added.

He said the man “was not here to fabricate or make things up.”

Defence QC Mark Stewart stressed the “trial has nothing to do with the Catholic Church.”

He stated: “The Catholic Church is not on trial here. A priest is not on trial here.”

He said: “These are ancient allegations made about a young teenage boy - about half a century ago before he had a career.”

The QC stated the male accuser “is a liar” and a “conspiracy theorist” while the woman is “suffering from a delusion.”

The man was “inconsistent” in his evidence, indicating someone who “doesn’t really know what he intended to say when he came in here. “

Mr Stewart told the jury: “The biggest killer piece of evidence “ over the man was what Macdonald allegedly said in Gaelic as he carried out the offence.

“But Monday was the first day he ever told anyone about this and he then said it didn’t have an English translation.”

This was the “icing on the cake” as what likelihood this “popped into his head” some 50 or so years later, he said.

The defence lawyer said there was no explanation why the man remained in contact with Macdonald over the years and invites him to conduct his wedding ceremony and children’s baptisms.

The man was “unhappy and bitter” over a historic row and decades later is still “driven by burning hostility” for some unknown reason against Macdonald, said Mr Stewart.

Only when his “intervention and anger” by other routes achieved nothing does he “play the sexual abuse card” at a time when there was a “fevered public view about Catholic priests, “ he said with Macdonald being an “easy soft target.”

On the other hand, the woman who claimed she was raped “”genuinely believed” what she was saying, he said.

But she sought an explanation for a lack of fulfilment and of self-respect in her life, as she suggested to the court, which had led to dishonesty and losing her job due to alcoholism, he told the jury.

Remaining in personal and social contact with Macdonald, even after her memory was said to return, showed she was “happy to be in his company,” he added.

The “complete destruction” of her account came from two men - who she also accused of “vile sexual abuse” on her, and thus would have been eye-witnesses, he said.

One of the men - who never held a passport and could not have been in Australia as she insisted - “laid to rest once and for all,” the girl was never traded for a place on a football team.