Notorious Irish paedo Carey Lyons admits to more than a dozen new charges

Carey Lyons pleaded guilty at Belfast Crown Court last week to a total of 16 counts of having child abuse images.

The 63-year-old committed the offences on dates between September 2014 and January 2018. Appearing via video-link from his solicitor’s office in Derry, Lyons was told by Judge Geoffrey Miller KC that he would be sentenced on March 31.

He is currently on bail and living at a Simon Community hostel on Bond’s Hill in the city.

Lyons has been a paedophile for almost 50 years, racking up more than 60 convictions and numerous spells in jail for downloading the vile images of abuse.

Multiple courts over the years have heard that he is a self-confessed addict of images of child abuse and he has sometimes deliberately reoffended to be jailed because he struggles with life outside prison.

In one case in 2013, he was found to have more than two million images on his computer, with investigating officers unable to examine and assess all of them due to the sheer number.

The court was told Lyons’ father had turned him in, fearing he was in breach of an earlier Sexual Offences Prevention Order banning him from having any computer.

Passing sentence in that case, Judge Patrick Kinney said reports “made for disturbing reading”, and although the custody threshold had clearly been passed, a probation order with supervision was the best way to deal with the matter.

The sentencing hearing in another case against the paedophile in 2017 was told he admitted to his probation officer he had a “long-term interest in children... and there may not be any treatment which will change this”.

In that case, he confessed to having more than 17,000 illegal images on his computer. They were found during a search by police after concerns were raised by the Probation Service.

Lyons has often immediately confessed to having such images when arrested and once told officers he was “at it again” when they searched his south Belfast flat in 2004 and found hundreds of sickening photographs.

He was also once described by his lawyer as “simply one of life’s inadequates”.

Lyons was one of the first people to be convicted of having indecent images of children when he was caught in 2000 following a tip-off to the RUC from Greater Manchester Police. When cops raided his then home in Newtownabbey, they found 50,000 still and moving images of children being sexually abused hidden beneath his bed.

During a police interview, the paedophile told officers: “I’ve been a bad boy. There’s stuff on my computer that there shouldn’t have been.”

It was revealed at his sentencing hearing that he was in the dock twice in 1978 for indecent assaults on children.