Penal Populism and Making Crime Illegal in Ireland

- William Dunne, Junior Editor

Anyone who spent some time in and around the Dublin Bay South area during the 2024 General Election campaign will likely recognise the name ‘Nick Delehanty’. If not, his campaign slogan, ‘Make Crime Illegal’, may at least ring a bell. In an interview with Meon, Delehanty described his tagline as a “call to action” – one that “highlight[ed] the gap between the laws on the books and the reality on our streets”.  For him, the Dublin of 2024 was facing a serious crisis: 

“Drug-related crime, anti-social behaviour, joy-riding and public disorder are rampant. Zombie heroin addicts roam freely, and businesses are suffering due to the constant threat of theft and vandalism … The reality is that the residents no longer feel safe, and the sense of community has been severely eroded.”

The apparent intent behind his inflammatory (if incoherent) slogan was to “underscore the need for stricter enforcement of existing laws”, and “ensure that those who commit crimes face appropriate consequences.” In particular, he called for a drastic reduction in the number of suspended sentences handed down by the courts, and criticised the general “leniency often shown towards repeat offenders” by the justice system. 

Essentially, Delehanty was advocating for the incoming government to be ‘tough on crime’. While this strategy ultimately failed to secure him a seat in the Dáil, he was far from the only candidate to embrace such rhetoric. Simon Harris, for example, promised a swift return to Fine Gael’s ‘the party of law and order’ roots – pledging to recruit an additional 6,000 Gardaí, double the garda training allowance and introduce further funding to incentivise member retention. Fianna Fáil likewise pledged an increase in the number of Garda recruits (although they could only stretch to 5,000). The party also promised to “make it harder to get bail”, in the words of Junior Minister James Browne, by requiring bail applications to be made in the High Court for charges of rape, sexual assault, aggravated burglary and knife crime. One might sense a theme here.

While Ireland has admittedly emerged relatively unscathed from the surge of far-right populism that has swept across Europe over the past number of years, this ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric nonetheless echoes a distinct form of populist politics. ‘Penal populism’, or ‘populist punitiveness’ – a term first coined by British criminologist Sir Anthony Bottoms in 1995 – refers to the ‘notion of politicians tapping into, and using for their own purposes, what they believe to be the public’s generally punitive stance’. It is usually associated with a public perception that crime is out of control (think of Delehanty’s description of a Dublin in ‘crisis’), and tends to manifest at general elections, when politicians put forward increasingly hard-line crime policies – which would, for example, remand more offenders into prison prior to sentencing and impose longer sentences – in order to achieve electoral success. In doing so, they seek to place themselves on the side of the ‘ordinary, law-abiding public’, generally disillusioned with the criminal justice system, in favour of an apparently ‘tougher’ approach, thereby ignoring or denigrating what would normally be considered ‘expert opinion’. The result, more often than not, is a system with increased rates of incarceration and prisons operating above maximum capacity.

Approaches like this have long dominated criminal justice policy in the USA, Great Britain and Australia – each of which continue to experience steadily rising rates of incarceration, accompanied by consistent prison overcrowding. However, over the past ten years, more and more extreme examples of penal populism have begun to appear across the globe. In mid-2016, for example, Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency of the Philippines by a landslide as a populist, anti-establishment candidate. During his campaign, Duterte leaned heavily into the ‘strongman’ rhetoric he had honed during his years as mayor of Davao City, with a particular focus on bringing a swift and brutal end to crime on the archipelago. Duterte vowed to rid the country of its illegal drug trade by overcoming the ‘corrupt’ bureaucracy in the justice system, to deliver peace and order in an immediate and decisive manner and, most importantly, to “Kill the Criminals!” – a promise he more than delivered on. Within the first month of his presidency, police operations resulted in the surrender of roughly 330,000 suspected drug users and dealers, over 9,000 arrests, and 664 deaths. In a 2020 report, the Philippines National Police acknowledged that there were 4,279 deaths related to the government’s war on drugs from July 2, 2016 to May 21, 2018, while other organizations estimate that between July 2016 and January 2018 up to 12,000 people were killed by state security forces or by non-state groups working with implicit sanction from the authorities. Despite his arrest last year under an ICC warrant charging him with crimes against humanity, Duterte remains remarkably popular amongst Filipinos.

More recently, ‘tough-on-crime’ political rhetoric has also become increasingly salient in Latin America, where several presidential candidates have successfully campaigned on platforms of extreme punitive policies. Referred to as the ‘Bukele effect’ – named after the current president of El Salvador, whose regime has arrested over 91,650 people accused of having gang affiliations as of March 2026 – the success of these leaders has led increased support for increasingly punitive policies, with protestors across the continent demanding their governments follow the example of Bukele and El Salvador (see, for example, the case of Honduras).

While Irish politics has managed to steer clear of developments akin to those experienced in both the Philippines and El Salvador, it nonetheless appears to have embraced a less extreme form of penal populism. Campaign messaging like Delehanty’s, which emphasises the idea that the government – in particular the justice system – has failed to protect its citizens by being too lenient on criminal offenders, seeks to both create and capitalise on a general sense of fear and punitive sentiment amongst the general public. Tough talk on ‘law and order’ has likewise become increasingly common in mainstream party politics, as leaders like Harris seek to avoid being seen as out of touch and soft on crime. The result is an increasingly punitive justice system, which prioritises harsh punishment and the apparent ‘will of the public’ over the opinion of analysts and experts.

While having only reappeared relatively recently, this is not the first instance of penal populism Ireland has experienced. Before the mid-1990s, crime was low as an issue on the electoral agenda of most voters. People were far more concerned with how the government would approach issues like unemployment, taxation and inflation – so much so that in February 1982, a survey conducted for The Irish Times revealed that 0% of a representative sample of the public felt that crime or law and order were the most important election issue. Ten years later, in 1992, another survey found that crime, vandalism, and law and order were considered to be a main election issue by just 8% of those polled.

However, the shootings of crime journalist Veronica Guerin and Garda detective Jerry McCabe (on the orders of a well-known gangland figure and by an apparently rogue IRA unit respectively) changed things dramatically. Accompanied by rising homicide rates in Dublin – the home of most national newspapers, television and radio stations – these murders brought crime to the forefront of public concern, prompting immediate government action. Following an emergency Dáil debate on law and order, a raft of criminal justice legislation was introduced. This included legislation for the creation of the controversial Criminal Assets Bureau. To draw on the work of Professor Ian O’Sullivan: 

“The tone of the debate changed dramatically, with an emphasis on zero tolerance policing, tougher sentencing (including the introduction of a presumptive minimum ten-year sentence for possession of drugs above a specified value; later extended to certain gun crimes), and prison expansionism. The penal system became more risk averse: the Constitution was amended to restrict the right to bail; temporary release for prisoners was curtailed; and there was a significant increase in time served by life sentence prisoners prior to being granted parole.”

Going into the 1997 election campaign, law and order topped the priority list of a now seemingly fearful public, selected by 41% of those surveyed as such. In response, politicians promised to ‘wage a war on crime’ (although none went so far as vowing to make it illegal). However, the public’s newfound infatuation with punitive criminal policy eventually began to oscillate, as matters such as healthcare, homelessness, house prices and unemployment became increasingly prevalent.

Writing in 2008, Professor Liz Campbell suggested that elements of the country’s criminal justice policy and practice were again supporting the existence of a form of penal populism. Focusing on the issues of bail, the exclusion of evidence and the sentencing of serious offenders, she argued that penal populism was ‘evident in the celebration of the views of ‘the people’, the growing distrust of intellectuals and complex procedures, and the ambivalence displayed towards the courts’ in the country.

Today, a similar situation seems to be unfolding. Aside from the ‘tough-on-crime’ rhetoric evident during the last election campaign, the new government has already implemented a number of policies akin to those of the late 1990s. It has, for example, pledged to create an additional 1,500 prison spaces across the country to ‘alleviate overcrowding’, including a new jail in Thornton Hall. Furthermore, in September 2024, legislation was amended to increase the maximum sentences for a number of knife-related crimes, while the 2024 Life Sentences Bill will allow judges to recommend minimum tariffs that should be served before an offender should be considered for parole (potentially upwards of thirty years). These punitive policies are no doubt a response to the recent civil unrest in the country, and the perceived desire of the public for tougher measures. As The Irish Times reported in 2024: ‘[g]angland feuding, the riots in Dublin 12 months ago, far-right-related disorder and murders [have forced] the issue – and people’s fears – to the fore’. The government is now responding, and a form of penal populism appears to make up part of that response.

However, there is an important question to ask here: does this approach actually work? Politics aside, how effective is penal populism at tackling crime? The answer, it would seem, is not particularly. Contrary to what is often assumed and the rhetoric we see in public debates, the available evidence would suggest that imprisonment is in fact not an effective way of preventing or reducing crime. From a deterrence standpoint, criminological research has long shown that increasing maximum sentences does not deter people from offending in the first place. Increasing sanctions has little influence on behaviour, as people tend to break rules:

1. assuming they will not be caught;

2. without thought as to the consequences of being caught or;

3. not caring if they are caught or not.

Even then, the evidence suggests that prison sentences generally fail to deter those who serve them from reoffending. Rather, imprisonment appears to cause more frequent reoffending than community sentences. Imprisonment, especially in the case of first-time offenders, alienates people from things that would otherwise help them avoid criminality in the first place; be it housing, family, employment or educational opportunities. Furthermore, the stigma surrounding imprisonment makes it far more difficult to rebuild one’s life around these things following their release. Coupled with the fact that Ireland’s prisons are already vastly overcrowded (with the latest data showing prison overcrowding at a record high, with capacity at more than 125%), policies that would increase the country’s prison population simply do not make sense. 

Interestingly, despite the common perception, research using focus groups and deliberative polling has also shown that the public may not be as punitive as survey data suggests. In 2022, a survey carried out by the Department of Justice showed that only 11% of respondents felt that criminal sentences should be longer, and that 2% felt the system was too lenient on young offenders. This hardly reflects a public desperate for a more punitive criminal justice system. Furthermore, a nationally representative survey held in 2007 – which gave participants €10 million to spend and guidance on what that might afford – found that Gardaí, youth workers and drug treatment spaces were the top three preferred investments. Only 5% of respondents elected to invest in the creation of additional prison spaces. These findings align with international research. A 2019 UK research report, for example, found that the perception that sentencing is too lenient ‘tends to lessen noticeably when the public are presented with actual scenarios and sentences’, while another suggested that people are statistically less likely to select prison when other options like restorative justice are presented. Based on the above, it is far from clear that Irish citizens would sooner see their neighbours thrown in prison than have their government attempt to solve the problems that led them to crime in the first place. Anyone, especially any politicians, who think otherwise, are more than likely mistaken.

With this in mind, a path forward for Irish penal policy seems relatively clear. If the government is serious about reducing crime, it must first recognise that the majority of its population does not, in fact, take an inherently punitive stance to crime and criminal justice. From there, it must meaningfully engage with research groups on policy formation, rather than denigrate criminological expertise. A research-based approach, that prioritises crime prevention over punishment through investment in housing, health and victim support services, is surely favourable to the continuing cycle of penal populism we are currently stuck in. The sooner we can remove ourselves from it, the better.