The purpose of justice in Ireland is not vengeance. It is the restoration of what was harmed, the protection of the nation from further harm, and where possible the return of the person who caused harm to a life of honest contribution. Imprisonment as a default response to wrongdoing is abolished. In its place, this constitution establishes four distinct responses to harm, applied according to the nature of the offence and the nature of the person who committed it. This reflects the Brehon legal tradition, which held that punishment alone heals nothing — but it is written for the Ireland of today, where community bonds are weaker than they once were and the state must carry more of the weight that neighbours and kin once shared.
Restorative Justice
For the great majority of offences, the primary response shall be restoration. The person who caused harm shall make good that harm — to the individual they harmed and to the community — through compensation, directed community service, supervised rehabilitation, or any combination of these. The goal is repair, not punishment. Restorative outcomes shall be proportionate, meaningful, and genuinely directed at undoing the harm caused. The state shall provide the structures, supervision, and support that make restorative justice real rather than merely nominal, recognising that in a society where tight-knit community networks can no longer be assumed, the state must actively facilitate the restorative process rather than leaving it to chance.
Therapeutic Detention
Where a person’s harmful conduct is rooted in addiction, trauma, or other treatable conditions, the response of the state shall be therapeutic, not punitive. Therapeutic detention shall be provided in humane, properly resourced facilities whose sole purpose is genuine recovery. It shall be time-limited, subject to regular independent review, and oriented entirely toward the person’s return to society as a functioning and contributing member. No person shall be held in therapeutic detention beyond the point at which independent clinical assessment confirms they no longer pose a risk to others. Therapeutic detention is not imprisonment. It shall never be experienced or administered as punishment.
Protective Custody
A small number of people cause serious harm to others not from circumstance or treatable illness, but from characteristics that independent clinical assessment establishes are not amenable to rehabilitation. Where a panel of no fewer than three independent clinicians — with no institutional, financial, or political interest in the outcome — unanimously assess that a person poses a genuine, serious, and ongoing danger to others that cannot be safely managed in the community, that person may be held in protective custody.
Protective custody is not punishment. It is honest acknowledgement that the safety of the nation requires that some people not be at liberty to harm others. Conditions of protective custody shall be humane. The person in custody retains all fundamental rights not incompatible with the fact of their detention. Every determination shall be reviewed by a fresh independent clinical panel at intervals of no more than twelve months. The moment that panel determines the person no longer poses the risk that justified their detention, they shall be released. No person shall remain in protective custody for a single day beyond what genuine safety requires.
Protective custody may never be used as a substitute for political persecution, as a response to unconventional beliefs or behaviour, or as a means of removing inconvenient persons from public life. Any clinician, official, or public servant who participates in a protective custody determination not genuinely and solely grounded in clinical evidence of danger to others commits a serious constitutional offence.
Custodial Detention
For a narrow category of the most serious offences — including murder, rape, the sexual abuse of children, and acts of terrorism or treason — custodial detention remains available where no other response adequately protects the nation. Such detention shall be proportionate, time-limited where possible, subject to regular review, and administered in conditions consistent with human dignity. It is never the automatic response to any offence. Courts shall consider all available responses before imposing custodial detention and shall state explicitly why no other response is adequate.
The state has a duty to ensure that every person leaving any form of detention is better equipped to live honestly than when they entered it. A justice system that returns people to society more damaged and more dangerous than it received them has failed the nation.