A Dublin-based Nigerian mother-of-three has been jailed for six years for sending a schoolgirl to have sex with a 64-year-old man who paid her $70 to arrange the meeting.

The man committed suicide three days after police began their investigations against 39-year-old cocaine addict Remilekin Thomas from West Dublin.

Thomas pleaded guilty at the Circuit Criminal Court to two charges of using a child for the purpose of sexual exploitation in May, 2008.

The Court was told that the man had paid $70 for full intercourse with the girl on at least six occasions at his home and on another occasion at a different location.

Police told the court that Thomas took the money from the teenager and gave her $15 just once. She also kept $150 handed over by the man for sex with the girl on another occasion.

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The girl first met the accused at Thomas’s home when she was a third year student at a local secondary school. Thomas was working as a prostitute at the time to feed her drug habit and the man involved was a client.

He asked her to source ‘another girl’ to have sex with him and Thomas arranged for the girl, whom she knew to be just 15, to meet the man.

The meetings continued until the girl’s mother reported Thomas to police who arrested her on an initial charge of organising prostitution.

Detective John Small told the court that the deceased man had admitted meeting the girl a number of times and paying her between $70 and $150 each time for sex.

Thomas’s lawyer Kenneth C Fogarty told the court that his client was a Nigerian national who had arrived in Ireland in 2000 and was now living legally in the State and had three children who were born here.

She turned to prostitution, he said, in 2005 to feed her drug habit.

Speaking directly to Judge Patrick McCartan, Thomas pleaded for mercy and apologised for her actions. “I’m sorry for everything I’ve caused. I’m trying to fix my habit. I’m sorry for the shame I have caused the family of the victim.”

Judge McCartan said Thomas’s crimes were “particularly disturbing” given the fact the accused was also a mother before sentencing her to four years on each count with the last two suspended.