Ms Fíona Ní Chinnéide:

I might leave that one last. With regard to the media, there are challenges as we know. The media has a very important function in terms of the public interest, but that is separate from what the public is interested in. There are huge problems with crime sensationalism. Cruel and unusual things have high news value, so when we have a media that is dependent on sales that is where the emphasis will be. Crime coverage is almost equal to entertainment. For example, a study of the Irish Daily Starfound that most coverage was given to sport, next was entertainment and after that it was crime. It is among those categories, so I do not believe there is a golden nugget there. There are some good publicly funded investigative journalism projects that are very hopeful for the future. I point members to the TheDetail.TV which did the investigative journalism to reveal the lengths of time individuals are spending in solitary confinement in Ireland. That was the first time those figures had been made available. Not all media are bad. In that case it revealed that of 51 men held in solitary confinement in January 2016, 24 had been so held for more than six months and nine for more than one year. Peter McVerry has said that individuals have been held in solitary confinement conditions for years in some cases. The media have a very important role in terms of transparency and public interest, so we do not wish to tar them all with the same brush.

Regarding community service, the 2016 statistics and annual reports will not be published until spring or summer. In 2015, there were 1,937 community service orders made. That compares with 2,190 in 2014 and 2,354 the previous year. I do not have the previous report but it was higher again in 2012. There has been a year on year decrease in community service orders being handed down. There are big questions as to why that should be the case. The IPRT will publish research in April this year, which we will be delighted to share with the committee, which examines those factors. Much of it is due to the role of information among the Judiciary and confidence in the Judiciary in the community service order options that are available locally. Community service should happen in the community where people live and our understanding is that community service is not consistently applied, available or used around the country. Again, we are back to the evidence base. We must look at the evidence, see where the problems are and address them.