An IT worker is back behind bars after being caught with thousands of indecent images of children.

Martin Andrew Cleator, 47, was arrested in June last year by police officers acting on intelligence.

A search of his home in Ballaquark, Farmhill, found he had downloaded just under 8,000 indecent images of children and one indecent movie.

He had only recently been released from prison on licence, having been jailed for two years in May 2017 for possessing more than 900,000 indecent images of children.

The was the largest cache UK police taskforce Titan - where they had been sent for analysis - had ever seen.

Of the 7,998 encrypted images police found by police at his home last year, a substantial number - 474 - were rated as level four, the second highest on the Copine Scale which is used for measuring the severity of such images.

During his police interview, he accepted the pictures were indecent and it was a ’disgusting crime’.

Cleator was last week jailed for a total of 15 months after pleading guilty to six counts of making indecent images of children.

Defence advocate Stephen Wood described his client as a man of ’complex psychological make-up’.

He said at the time he committed the offences, Cleator was ’effectively in self-destruct mode’ and he considered the best place for him was Jurby prison.

’He considered he was worthless, ostracised by society, the relationship between him and his wife was in difficult waters,’ said Mr Wood.

’He thought at the time that the best place for him that society could put him was back in Jurby.’

Mr Wood said it was highly likely that his offences would be unearthed and this in all likelihood was what he intended.

But he said his client had recognised it was time to move on. He had been open and honest in a psychological assessment and with those ’walls having come down’, he was now in a much better position for targeted treatment.

Jailing him for 15 months, Deemster Alastair Montgomerie said an aggravating factor was that the offences were committed during the period of extended sentence for licence purposes.

But he said the defendant had ’fallen between the cracks’ between the probation and mental health services when he was released from prison.

He hailed a psychological report into the defendant as ’one of the most thorough he had ever read’.

This diagnosed him as having a borderline personality disorder and recommended intensive dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT).

He did not present as an indiscriminate paedophile and there was no immediate risk he would molest children or abduct females - his most likely offending would involve accessing child abuse images.

Deemster Montgomerie pointed out that any child pornography necessarily involved the sexual abuse of children which would have long-term effects on its victims.

The Deemster said he would insist that Cleator received DBT. And he make it ’perfectly clear’ that he did not expect him to once again fall between the cracks between services on his release from custody.

He placed Cleator on the sexual offenders’ register for seven years and set his extended sentence for licence purposes at two and a half years.

The Deemster adjourned until October 3 consideration of a sexual offences prevention order and confiscation of a NZXT tower computer.