Siobhan Maguire’s sentence reduced on appeal

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

The Court of Appeal reduced Siobhan Maguire’s prison sentence to three years, with the final year suspended, after allowing her appeal against sentences for offences involving her employers’ cheques. Mr Justice Edwards delivered the court’s judgment on 3 October 2018.

The final year was suspended for two years after her release, subject to her entering a €100 bond to keep the peace and be of good behaviour during that period. The sentence was backdated to 26 October 2017.

Maguire had signed guilty pleas to 15 counts of theft, one of larceny, one of forgery and 15 of fraud. The 32 sample counts represented 1,320 charges arising from the fraudulent negotiation of 660 cheques.

On 26 October 2017, Dublin Circuit Criminal Court had imposed 32 concurrent four-year sentences. The Court of Appeal quashed them, finding sufficient grounds to suspect a deficiency in the original assessment of gravity or mitigation, or both.

The appeal court assessed the offending as warranting a six-year sentence before mitigation and found that substantial mitigation justified a reduction of at least 50%. It also noted that Maguire was doing well in custody.

Maguire had worked as a secretary and personal assistant to two professionals and was responsible for lodging cheques to their accounts. The judgment said she made full admissions and that the offending went back to 2001, spanned 14 years and involved €1,187,616.07. It said gardaí could not determine exactly how the stolen money had been spent.