Deirdre Reynolds: Robberous taxi driver rapist Raymond Shorten sends shivers down your spine

The taxi driver only had to bring his passengers safely to their front door – and then drive off to finish the rest of his shift.

Instead, on two separate occasions in 2022, the Dubliner grossly abused the trust of young women who got into the back seat of his taxi and just wanted to go home to bed after a night of drinking.

A jury took just 76 minutes on Friday to find the 50-year-old guilty of raping a 19-year-old and a 20-year-old woman. The two women did not know each other and had the misfortune of being picked up by the taxi driver in the summer after having a few drinks with friends in the city centre.

Normally I would be typing synonyms like “monster” or “vermin” on my keyboard.

But what makes the whole thing even more terrifying is the fact that the now convicted rapist is also a human being: an unremarkable-looking, jowled middle-aged man who could be sitting in the driver’s seat of any taxi in any city across the country on any night of the week.

Like most women who have climbed into the back of a taxi after a night of drinking and felt a subconscious fear at the sound of the doors automatically locking, I felt sick when I read about the ordeal the two women had endured at the hands of the “predatory” Shorten, as the prosecution described it.

In court, the Clondalkin resident added something more: he claimed the sickening acts he committed in the back of his taxi – after one victim had fallen asleep and the other kept losing consciousness – were “consensual” and that they had even instigated the attacks.

The lie that gave him away in his fabricated statement to police, read in court, was that a young woman would ever call him “sweet,” let alone kiss him voluntarily.

After the verdict, his victims will hopefully be able to move on with their lives… but how?

It is difficult to imagine an easy path back to the carefree life that a woman in her twenties should lead after such a traumatic experience.

For example, how can you expect either of them to confidently hail a taxi back home?

How can a woman put herself in danger when we are constantly warned when rape cases are reported on the news not to go home alone after dark?

Most of the time, of course, this is not the case, although this case is certainly not an anomaly in Ireland.

Most of the time we just get in, have a bit of a chat if we’re sober, or concentrate on not getting sick if we’re not, and then all we have to worry about is finding the key to the front door in our handbag – and I’m sure all decent Dublin taxi drivers must be just as disgusted to have someone like Shorten in their ranks.

The best wait until we are inside and the lights are on before heading out into the night again. Unfortunately, the two women involved had to experience the worst of it, but thanks to their incredible courage in reliving the nightmare, at least there is one less person on our roads.