Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for attending and for making such interesting points. I hope they have put Deputy O'Callaghan's Bill into oblivion. In fairness to the Deputy, he stated at last week's meeting that "sentencing is an extremely complicated area and politicians sometimes try to simplify it by introducing legislation". The Deputy's words should be remembered. He is not all bad.

I do not really have any questions for our guests because they have addressed all of the issues I wished to raise. They have given us their take on the matter and what they said makes sense. There is a lack of joined-up thinking on the part of the Government. As Ms. Malone pointed out, the State is failing people. Many of them end up in prison and some commit suicide. We have legislation that is not being applied. People think that we do not have good building regulations in Ireland because there has been so much bad construction work uncovered but we actually have world class building regulations in this country. The problem is that the implementation of those regulations is not supervised so we end up with bad buildings.

Prison does not work and the fact that the numbers being imprisoned are increasing means that something is wrong. Rehabilitation does not seem to be a feature, even though it is supposed to be part of the prison regime. Deputy Clare Daly and I having been visiting prisons regularly for years and have seen that they do not do what they are supposed to do. Prisons are supposed to educate prisoners so that they will not reoffend and will become fit members of society on release. If prisoners come out of prison and reoffend, then obviously imprisonment is not working. We know that prisons do not work and yet we continue to fill them with people, often as a knee-jerk response to different issues. What should the Government do to address the fact that prison does not work, apart from not failing people in the first instance? Do our guests agree that we have a very black and white approach to dealing with crime?