If this is your first offence, then it’s extremely unlikely.
While a prison sentence is a possibility, this is only really reserved for people who are being prosecuted for drink driving a second, third or fourth time.
Or who cause injuries to someone else.
For those people jail is a real possibility.
"The circuit court judge read his 2-page complaint with interest.
He wrote him back.
His response contained one word: “Noted”
In fact, you have to work extremely hard to avoid it.
If this is your first time in court for drink driving, you’ll almost certainly not be receiving a jail sentence.
I did know a judge once who jailed everyone who was convicted of drink driving before him.
Everyone, without exception.
The man was an idiot.
It didn’t matter if you had never been in trouble with the law before. If you pleaded guilty, or were found guilty by him of drink driving, you were automatically sent to prison.
It was sheer lunacy, but thankfully very rare.
The unintended consequences of his behaviour were that everyone who appeared before him charged with drink driving pleaded not guilty.
Even people who had hopeless cases.
They did this because they knew that if they pleaded guilty, they would be sent to prison.
Pure and simple.
This caused an enormous growth in desperate trials, a backlog of court lists and endless appeals.
Even people with no objective hope of winning their cases, were herded down the narrow road of pleading not guilty because of one judge.
Because if you pleaded guilty you were going to jail.
And nobody ever wants to go to jail.
Under this judge appeals rocketed by 900%, an unheard-of statistic. I was told this by the district court clerk assigned to this judge.
It is a figure unlikely to ever be equaled again.
Scores of people were appealing sentences of imprisonment for first-time offences of drink driving. His arrogance and condescending attitude towards even very decent people who came before him for speeding offences was disgraceful.
A physically big man he would hector these people in open court, hard-working people who had never seen the inside of the court in their lives and belittle them.
He seemed to take a real pleasure in publicly demeaning people.
His own colleagues on the bench disliked him.
The State Solicitor (State prosecutor) assigned to this judge’s district once told me a very funny story about him. The judge was busily hammering everyone for every conceivable road traffic offence. Where most judges imposed fines of €200-€400 for driving without tax, he was giving the maximum fine of €1,200.
Where most judges handed down financial penalties of between €400-€800 for people convicted of driving without insurance for the first time, he was giving the maximum, €2,500.
Almost no judge was jailing someone convicted of drink driving for the first time.
Except him.
Everybody was forced to appeal these absurd sentences.
The Circuit Court judge who had to face the tsunami of appeals was the mirror opposite of the district court judge. He was a short man who spoke softly and thanked people for coming to court. He was always unfailingly polite.
The difference between the two men might have been quantified in one word: 'breeding'.
"A physically big man he would hector people in open court,
hard-working people who had never seen the inside of the court
in their lives, and belittle them.
He seemed to take a real pleasure in publicly demeaning people"
But he had a dilemma: there were so many appeals that it would take him 2 or 3 days to get through a list that should normally take one day.
What to do?
Always innovative, he devised a strategy. He decided to group all the insurance cases in one pile, all the NCT cases in another pile, the tax cases in another and so on.
Then he gave each of the appeals in each pile the same reasonable penalty.
In a stroke he cut his lists down to size.
Hearing about this the District Court judge was outraged.
He was upset that the cases that he had spent so much time considering were all now being grouped together and each were getting the same arbitrary penalty.
He was annoyed that these cases were not being decided individually on their own merits.
He decided to write a 2-page letter to his colleague on the Circuit Court to vent his displeasure at how his cases were being dealt with.
The circuit court judge read his 2-page complaint with interest. He wrote him back. His response contained one word: “Noted”.
I still laugh when I remember that story.
Can you go to jail for drink driving in Ireland?
Of course, it’s possible but it’s usually only something that’s reserved for people with two or more convictions for drink driving.
It’s also a risk for people who have no previous convictions but who crash into somebody. If someone is hurt as a result of a collision due to drink driving, then jail is a very strong possibility.
But these are very rare cases. The vast majority of drink driving cases do not involve injuries to anybody else.
So, jail is not a realistic possibility.
But I never consider losing these cases, much less the possibility of jail.
Kommentare