The payment of compensation to the victims of sex offences by an offender does not prevent the courts imposing a custodial sentence on such offenders, the Court of Criminal Appeal decided yesterday.
However, any such compensation might be taken into consideration when sentencing was being considered, it also said.
The three-judge court was giving judgments in two cases in which the victims had accepted compensation from their abusers and where the sentences were suspended by the trial judge, Mr Justice Paul Carney.
The DPP had argued there was undue leniency in the sentences imposed.
Giving the CCA decision, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, presiding, said the CCA was satisfied there was no jurisprudence, principle or practice which rendered the payment of compensation to the victim of sexual assault inconsistent with the imposition of a custodial sentence.
Indeed, he added, any such supposed practice conflicted with and contradicted the express wording of the Criminal Justice Act which stated that any direction to pay compensation "may" be "instead of, or in addition to, dealing with him in any other way".
John McCabe (39), a farmer, Cootehill, Co Cavan, had pleaded guilty in June 2004 to aggravated sexual assault on a foreign woman in Dundalk in September 2002.
At the end of the sentencing hearing and after McCabe offered €15,000 compensation to the victim, the trial judge had imposed a four-year sentence but had suspended the jail term on condition that he enter a bond to be of good behaviour for three years.
Yesterday, the CCA said that, although the trial judge had erred in principle in the manner in which he approached the sentence in that case, the term he had actually imposed was appropriate. On that basis, it refused the DPP's application.
In the second case, John McLaughlin (24), Alderpark Court, Tallaght, Dublin, pleaded guilty in late 2004 to rape.
The trial judge was told he had offered €10,000 compensation. The judge imposed a three-year sentence which he suspended for five years on McLaughlin's entering into a bond of €1,000 to be of good behaviour.
The CCA decided that McLaughlin should be sentenced to four years, with the last three years suspended, having regard to the fact that payment was made in the particular case.
In the McCabe case, counsel for the DPP had submitted that any practice whereby the payment of compensation would preclude the imposition of a custodial sentence would lead to a variety of highly unsatisfactory outcomes.
For example, certain victims might be impecunious and as a result feel constrained to accept compensation which, if they were in different financial circumstances, they might refuse.
Counsel for McCabe had stressed there was no "cheque book" dimension to the case.
McCabe was a small farmer who had liquidated his herd of cattle to raise funds to make the compensation payment.
It was as far removed from any hypothetical case of a wealthy offender buying his way out of trouble as one could imagine, it was argued.