In the past decade or so a significant body of work on ‘Hibernian exceptionalism’ to broader punitive trends has emerged. The dominant argument and characterisation of Irish penality within this broad schema is that it is exceptional for having been largely stagnant. This article takes issue with the stagnation or ‘stickiness’ that is often supposed to characterise the Irish penal system arguing that stagnation as a form of ‘path dependency’ fails to adequately account for key moments of penal change and downplays the temporal dynamics that are often apparent in policy development. Using two key ‘policy windows’ as case studies – the 1996 ‘moral panic’ over crime and the post-2011 turn to a more progressive penal politics – it argues that greater consideration should be given to the ‘translation’ and ‘layering’ of policy decisions and the growing complexity of policy space that may result.