Consistency in Sentencing

INTRODUCTION Ireland has an individualised system of sentencing in which judges exercise a relatively broad sentencing discretion. Since the foundation of the State in 1922 few attempts have been made to change or challenge the nature of the Irish sentencing system. This lack of reform, however, does not necessarily reflect widespread satisfaction with the system as a whole. Indeed, a recurrent criticism of the Irish sentencing system is that judicial sentencing practices are widely inconsistent. In the 1990s the Law Reform Commission carried out a detailed study and evaluation of the sentencing system in Ireland. In particular, the Commission considered the fact that like cases could be treated differently, and justifiably so, as the worst type of inconsistency in sentencing and it concluded that “intuitively” the existence of inconsistency in Irish sentencing practices was a certainty. Since then, the issue of inconsistency in Irish sentencing practices has also been highlighted in the media on a regular basis. Perhaps the most notable example is the Prime Time documentary broadcast