The victim in the Irish criminal process: a journey from dispossession towards partial repossession

This article has sought to examine the criminal justice system s interactions with victims of crime. It is arelationship which has changed irrevocably over time. A significant discontinuity occurred in the nineteenthcentury when a new architecture of criminal and penal semiotics slowly emerged. An institutional way ofknowing interpersonal conflict crystallised, one which reified system relations over personal experiences. Italso emphasised new ideals and values such as proportionality, legalism, procedural rationality, equality anduniformity. New commitments, discourses and practices came to the fore in the criminal justice network. Inmodernity, the problem of criminal wrongdoing became a rationalised domain of action, a site which activelydistrusted and excluded non-objective truth claims. The state, the law, the accused and the public interestbecame the principal claims-makers within this institutional and normative arrangement, an arrangementwhich would dominate criminal and penal relations for the next 150 years. In the last 40 years, the victimhas slowly re-emerged as a stakeholder in the criminal process.