Legislation affecting the substantive criminal law 1996 and 1997

Until the beginning of the 1990s reform of the substantive criminal law has not been a legislative priority. As a result the law consisted of an amalgam of common law and statutory provisions. The principles of liability and the general defences thereto have, in the main, been the material of the common law and their development has fallen within the judicial domain. A mixture of common law and statutory provisions governed particular offences. But even in this case legislation tended to be based on a common law background. Statutes usually were consolidating in nature, rather than codifying, as for example is the case with the Larceny Act, 1916. This coupled with the oblique, and increasingly outdated, manner in which important statutes, such as the 1861 legislation, were drafted led to an unsatisfactory state of affairs. The Oireachtas continued this for many years with changes to the substantive criminal law being secondary to other legislative concerns. For example, the offences of burglary and robbery were amended not as part of a reform of the law on dishonesty but in order to harmonise those offences with their equivalents in Northern Irish law so as to the facilitate the operation of the Criminal Law (Jurisdiction) Act, 1976.