James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Effectively, what the court has found in both the Ellis case and the McManus case is that a mandatory sentence for a second or subsequent conviction is unconstitutional because it is only applying the criminal law to a very small subset of people. That is the basis on which the court found it to be unconstitutional. A provision in criminal law should effectively apply to everybody.

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