Crime control, the security state and constitutional justice in Ireland: discounting liberal legalism and deontological principles

It is clear that Ireland has witnessed evidence of a ‘tooling up’ of the state in the fight against crime over the last two decades. Crime control analyses—often relying upon the use of stark juxtaposition—are very useful in describing this trend. They can, however, also conceal the complexities that exist underneath the illusory comfort of binary labels such as ‘crime control’, ‘security state’, ‘actuarial justice’ or ‘Rule by Law’ governance. In employing examples of recent case-law relating to terrorism and sexual offending, this article will argue that crime control analyses fail to properly account for particular legal liberal properties such as rights as trumps, deontological reasoning, fidelity to precedent, the coordinated and hierarchical features of law, and the last ‘authoritative voice’ possessed by the judiciary in dispute resolution. These properties continue to possess institutional and epistemic authority in Ireland, and need to be written in to any ‘history of the present’ of the Irish criminal justice system.