The Regulation of White-Collar Crime in Ireland: An analysis of regulatory enforcement in banking, company, worker safety and competition law

My thesis examines the regulation of white-collar crime in Ireland across the areas of company, banking, competition and worker safety law. I compare how the State regulated white-collar crime during the 20th century to how it currently regulates this form of criminality. I argue that the Irish State now has a strong preference for persuasion-based mechanisms of crime control which seek to increase compliance with the law rather than punish wrongdoers for actual or potential white-collar crimes. My work shows that while the number and severity of white-collar criminal offences have increased in recent years, these laws are generally not enforced using the criminal law itself. Rather, I show that a new non-criminal crime-fighting toolkit now represents the vast majority of regulatory responses to actual or potential white-collar crimes in Ireland. These non-criminal means of crime control are made up of a mix of informal, formal, statutory, non-statutory, civil and/or administrative interventions that seek to achieve compliance with the law and not punish wrongdoing. My work shows that the criminal law is now only deployed for egregious and/or repeated white-collar criminality in my four areas of research and that this approach can be broadly mapped over to the theories of responsive and risk-based regulation.