A CRUEL STEPFATHER who treated his partner’s children “like slaves”, subjecting them to almost daily physical and degrading mental abuse in the Midlands in the 1990s, has been jailed for four years. Mullingar Circuit Criminal Court heard that decades later, the siblings, two sisters and their brother, remain scarred. Judge Johnson heard how the man lost his own mother at a young age and ended up in a children’s home until his father remarried. The court heard he was obsessed with getting them to clean the house constantly. The court heard how he ransacked their rooms if they were not tidied up well enough and would make them start all over again.