The Court of Appeal has left a three-year prison sentence in place for Patrick McDonagh over a bogus quad bike sale in Tuam, despite finding that the original sentencing judge had started from an excessively high headline term.
McDonagh pleaded guilty to deception after taking €1,350 from a man at a business park in Tuam on 11 March 2014. The money was handed over for a quad bike, but McDonagh failed to appear at either of two locations arranged for its collection.
He was identified in May 2014 but later failed to appear in court. Four bench warrants were eventually issued before he was arrested in June 2020. He received three years’ imprisonment the following month.
The Circuit Court had placed the offence at a headline, or pre-mitigation, sentence of four-and-a-half years out of a statutory maximum of five years. The judge relied on factors including premeditation, previous dishonesty convictions and McDonagh’s conduct in delaying the prosecution.
The Court of Appeal held that four-and-a-half years was too high for this offence. It said an appropriate starting point would instead have been at the upper end of the middle sentencing range.
Ordinarily, that error would have led the appeal court to quash the sentence and impose a new one. However, events after the Mayo case changed the position.
In December 2020, McDonagh was sentenced in Cavan for earlier offences, including demanding money with menaces. Those sentences were made consecutive to the three-year term already imposed, but the Cavan judge expressly applied the “totality principle” — the requirement to ensure that combined consecutive sentences remain proportionate — and suspended the final 12 months.
The Court of Appeal found that the later judge had effectively moderated the overall punishment because of the three-year sentence now under appeal. Reducing that first sentence would therefore risk giving McDonagh a disproportionate benefit.
The court concluded that the combined sentencing outcome was fair and just and dismissed the appeal.