The Supreme Court dismissed appeals by the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Garda Commissioner and the Minister for Justice and Equality concerning the fines regime that took effect on 11 January 2016.
The appeals concerned Gavin Owens and Patrick Dooley, who had been sentenced under the previous regime. Under that regime, a court imposing a fine typically also set a period of imprisonment to be served if the fine was not paid within a specified time. The Fines (Payments and Recovery) Act 2014 introduced measures principally intended to prevent people from automatically going to prison for non-payment.
The question was whether the new regime applied to people sentenced under the old one when the default provisions in their orders had not been implemented before the Act came into force. Chief Justice Clarke described the issue as whether the legislation was retrospective in that limited sense. He noted that both the original fines and defaults occurred under the old regime.
Clarke said he agreed with the judgment of Justice Dunne and concluded that the legislation was partially retrospective, following the reasons in her judgment. He described that construction as the “least bad interpretation” and said the appeals should be dismissed. The extract does not give the individual sentences, fines or the specific orders made in either respondent’s case.
Clarke also said the legislation left the Court with a difficult interpretive question affecting individuals’ rights and obligations, although the transition between the regimes was foreseeable. He said the legislation could have stated clearly whether the new regime applied in those circumstances. He noted that implementation problems with the Act had arisen but said they were not relevant to these appeals.
The source is Clarke’s concurring judgment. It records his agreement with Dunne’s judgment and refers to a judgment by Justice Finlay Geoghegan, but does not reproduce either judgment’s full reasoning or set out the appeals’ complete procedural history.