Man (21) jailed for attacking women including his pregnant partner

Natasha Reid

A 21-year-old man has been jailed for six years for attacking two women, including his pregnant partner, in their homes a year apart.

He beat his first victim, who owed him a drug debt, over her head with an iron. He was on bail for that offence when he strangled his pregnant partner.

His barrister said that violence had become “normalised in his psychology” due to the violence he had endured from a young age.

Harry Bamidele, with an address at Tor an Rí Lane, Clondalkin in Dublin, was before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Thursday, where he was charged with assault causing harm to each woman.

He pleaded guilty to the assault on the first woman at her home in Dublin on September 19th, 2024, and to assaulting the second woman at her home in the city on October 6th, 2025.

The court heard that Bamidele was his first victim’s drug dealer, and that he used to meet her at a post office every week for her to pay her debts.

On this occasion she woke around 9am to find him in her home, holding a clothes iron to her head.

He wanted her to get up to go to the post office with him but said she wasn’t moving fast enough.

She told gardaí that he hit her over the head with the iron about 20 times in 30 seconds. She said that there was blood everywhere and that the iron was in pieces afterwards.

“Look what you made me do,” he said to her after the attack. “It’s not about the money. It’s the principle.”

He told her to clean herself up and meet him at the post office in 30 minutes.

She rang her sister, who alerted the emergency services, and she was rushed to hospital by ambulance and treated for lacerations, bruising and swelling.

The court heard that, even during this time, Bamidele was still ringing her to see where she was.

He was arrested and charged, and was on bail by the time he attacked his pregnant partner on October 6th, 2025.

Garda Mark Hughes explained that she and Bamidele had a verbal altercation in her bedroom. She locked herself in the bathroom, but he broke the door in.

“He put his two hands around my neck and started to strangle me,” she told gardaí.

She said it lasted two to three minutes, during which time she couldn’t breathe and was in complete fear.

She later used her iPhone to take photos of the marks on her neck, but he ‘flipped’ when he saw them and smashed the phone.

She told gardaí that she had serious concerns for her and her baby’s health following the attack.

She called the gardaí a week later when he again arrived at her home and threatened her to such an extent that she was put in fear.

When Gda Hughes arrived, he found Bamidele with a scissors in his hand and his partner ‘visibly petrified’. He separated them and arrested the accused.

At first, he denied strangling her, but later admitted it, insisting that it had happened only for a second.

Under cross-examination by David Fleming, defending, Gda Hughes agreed that he said he had been snorting tablets that day.

Neither woman gave a victim impact statement.

The court heard that he had 14 previous convictions.

Fleming told Judge Elma Sheahan that his client had asked him to apologise in open court to his first victim. He had already had an opportunity to offer an apology to his former partner, who had accepted it, and had accepted that he was out of control, he said.

Counsel explained that his client was the second youngest of five children and that his father had left the family on the birth of his younger brother, when the accused was just two years old.

His mother, who was in court to support her son, then had to work fulltime, with his client’s older siblings caring for him while she was at work.

Another brother, who was 12 years older than him, became his father figure, but disciplined with violence.

Counsel said that a pivotal moment in his client’s childhood occurred when he was 13, and his then 25-year-old brother scalded him with boiling water. Fleming said that this appeared to have a profound effect on his psychology, resulting in feelings of worthlessness.

He started smoking cannabis, which he found calmed him. By the age of 14, he was smoking 5g a day. With no way to afford it, he began selling it to finance his habit.

After being excluded from school the following year, he turned to cocaine and was taking 2.5g of cocaine a day and selling it by the age of 16. He then began taking “benzos and whatever tablets he could get his hands on”.

Counsel said that he was regularly beaten and terrorised when he couldn’t pay for his drugs.

“Violence became normalised in his psychology,” he said.

With his first victim, he meted out the sort of violence that was being done to him, he explained. He had even quoted to her what others had said to him following beatings, when he said: “Look what you’ve made me do...”

Counsel handed in a psychological report, which said that Bamidele had poor mental health, was psychologically vulnerable and had poor coping mechanisms.

Judge Sheahan noted the ‘horrendous’ nature of his offending.

She said that she took into consideration his experiences growing up, and the effect that the events involving his older brother had on him.

She imposed a total sentence of seven years and eight months, but suspended the final 20 months on condition that he come under the supervision of the Probation Services.