Director of Public Prosecutions -v- Redmond, [2022] IECA 44, January 24, 2022, at paragraphs 54 and 55:

We have said before that sentencing for multiple offences is never easy as it requires the weighing and sifting of multiple considerations with a view to imposing what ultimately must be a just and proportionate sentence. The sentencing scholar Nils Jareborg has famously characterised it as “the most complicated topic in criminal law, in those countries that care about it at all”.  Where there are a large number of offences involved it is very likely that the court will seek to have recourse to a combination of consecutive and concurrent sentences in structuring the global result. The appellant is correct in saying that recourse to consecutive sentencing should be sparing, but it is a legitimate tool in the toolbox of the sentencing judge and the occasion of sentencing for multiple offences is one of those occasions on which its use may be apposite. While consecutive sentencing should be engaged in sparingly, it is not the law that it should only be engaged in exceptionally.

In The People (DPP) v Crowley [2021] IECA 178 we made the point that where a sentencing judge is faced with sentencing for multiple offences, and particularly a large number of offences, the sentencer may be faced with conflicting desiderata. On the one hand, it is desirable in principle that each offence should receive its own sentence. However, if proportionate individual sentences were to be applied to individual offences and made wholly concurrent inter se it might give rise to a perception that the sentencing court was failing to reflect the repetitive nature of the offending, the multiplicity of separate occasions on which there was offending, and the number of individual victims involved. Some might feel that the offender was receiving something of a “free ride” by virtue of the way in which such sentence was structured. On the other hand, if proportionate individual sentences were to be applied to individual offences and they were crudely accumulated by the application of consecutive sentencing, it might equally give rise to a perception that the cumulative or aggregate total was disproportionate, perhaps even to the extent of being “crushing”. The solution is often to be found in the careful structuring of a sentencing regime that deploys a combination of consecutive and concurrent sentencing. This is not the only possible approach, and we have spoken of others in other cases, but it is the solution to which recourse is most commonly had in this jurisdiction, and it is the one resorted to by the sentencing judge in this case.