The re-emergence of the victim of crime within Irish criminal justice

Recent years have seen a re-introduction of the victim of crime into Irish criminal justice. This thesis intends to gauge the nature and extent of this reemergence. One of the ways in which the author seeks to achieve this is by examining the ‘axis of individualisation’ that both Foucault (1978) and Garland (2001) used to examine criminal justice in Europe and America. This describes how the exercise of power affectsthe groups that it happens to touch. The following study therefore seeks to show how the power dynamics and attention of Irish criminal justice have now moved from the offender onto the victim of crime. This work is therefore an attempt to extend this analysis to Ireland in order to demonstrate how the victim has re-emerged within the criminal justice frames of this country as both a subject and target of these power relations. These changes have, to a certain extent, helped to move them back into their previously influential criminal justice role. The author hopes that by approaching the task of writing a history of the modern crime victim in Ireland in this way that they will be better able to extrapolate how power dynamics have affected the subjectivity of victimhood, and how this has come to the fore of our late modern societies. This endeavour will not only draw upon some of the work of the intellectual giants that were previously mentioned but it will also evidence how a new legal culture of inclusion has emerged with regards to victims of crime. It will tend to focus particularly upon how this has found expression within some of the novel developments in human rights and legal regulation that have evolved in more recent years, which have considerably promoted the re-inclusion of some of the more historically marginal stakeholders within the legal system such as victims of crime. The thesis therefore attempts to study some of these major legal advances so as to ultimately better comprehend how legality helped to alter the victim of crime’s symbolic and procedural role within contemporary Irish criminal justice.