Judges owed a duty to society to get their decisions right, Minister for Justice Michael McDowell said during the resumed committee stage debate on the Criminal Justice Bill.
Mr McDowell said he was counselling the House not to go down the road where the judges should retire to being independent arbiters between two conflicting views.
"That would be a heinous error. Part of the job of a judge is to be an independent arbiter between two sides at that stage of the case, but an equally serious part is to take on the role of defending the Irish people's constitutional rights by punishing crime in an appropriate way."
Mr McDowell said there was a deep philosophical trend emerging which stated that if the judges were getting it wrong, the Director of Public Prosecutions should tell them.
"That is not right. It is for the judiciary to get it right in the first instance and on appeal.
"Judges will not approach cohesion and consistency if they do not sit down together and discuss hypothetical cases, if they not generate the database we have mentioned, if they do not keep each other informed of what they are doing and if they do not take collective responsibility for this area of law which is their responsibility alone."
Mr McDowell said there was a tendency to say that every individual case was different from all others and that all judges were free to do what they thought, as there was an appellate process to correct them if they got it wrong.
"That is totally unhistorical. When imposing sentence, it is the function of a judge to defend Irish society from crime.
"He must impose a sentence that commands public confidence and there is no escaping that obligation.
"He cannot say that the media and the politicians were all wrong and he was all right. Judges are independent, but part of their independence is that they owe a duty to Irish society to get their decisions right."
Fine Gael justice spokesman Jim O'Keeffe asked if the Minister was in favour of a prosecution's submission on sentencing.
Mr McDowell said he did not believe that a prosecutor should demand 18 years or something like that.
"If the Courts Service developed a corpus of data, it should be open to a prosecutor to draw to the attention of a judge precedents from the Court of Criminal Appeal, as well as the general pattern of sentencing in an area. It should be reasonable to put those points to a judge."
Mr McDowell said that nearly 20 years ago, he was a barrister in a case which dealt with the reduction in a 21-year sentence for rape.
"From memory, I think it was reduced to 16 or 17 years. In that case, the Supreme Court stated that rape was such an offence that it demanded an immediate and substantial prison sentence in every circumstance, except in highly unusual circumstances which the court could not imagine. That was a principle, but I do not know what has happened since, because we now have suspended sentences."
Mr O'Keeffe said that rape was one of the most heinous crimes imaginable and anybody convicted of it should automatically have a custodial sentence imposed. That would be a starting point.
The debate on the Bill resumes today.
