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Accordingly when the Probation Service were specifically invested with the function of
bringing the community service order into operation the agency embarked upon a process
of change which would seriously realign that agency as a functionary of the court and
within the justice model.
PART 2
THE OPERATION OF COMMUNITY SERVICE ORDERS IN IRELAND
Communityservice as a sentencing option has been available to the Irish courts since 1984,
but how have the courts made use of the sanction and with what frequency? Was the
sanction to achieve widespread application in every criminal court or did it predominate in
the sentencing patterns of any particular court? Was the target group identified in the
White Paper or the Oireachtas debates reached in sentencing practice and to what degree?
These issues will be dealt with presently in light of a series of studies conducted since the
introduction of the sanction. To answer these questions the analytical approach adopted
hereafter is to examine common issues associated with the sanction of community service
but under different headings. Such an approach will facilitate a fuller understanding of the
sanction in everyday practice. In the course of such examination, some issues may appear
to be revisited more than once but from slightly different angles, e.g. the critical
relationship between community service and the custodial sentence. The judges’ responses
on the community service order deal not only with the relationship between community
service and imprisonment, but range far wider touching upon such issues as the suitability
or more critically the unsuitability of offenders for community service; concerns about the
use of discretionary practices and finally factors which otherwise may inhibit the greater
use of the sanction. This section will disclose that community service in Ireland is not
utilised as an alternative to the custodial sentence as often as one might expect in the
circumstances. The present use of communityservice is limited to relativelyfewcourts. On
the other hand the sanction of imprisonment endures as the benchmark upon which many
sentences are measured due it will be argued, to a reluctance bysentencers to deployother
sanctions including community service. Such reluctance may be due in part to a lack of
confidence that fines will be collected, offenders on community based sanctions will be
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