Ms Caron McCaffrey:

We retendered to see if we could get somebody else to provide that service and we were not successful. In consultation with the Prison Officers Association - this was a very big industrial relations issue at the time - we came up with a proposal that would allow us to provide work-training activities to prisoners, utilising the mess facilities that were already there in our prisons, but that the management and oversight of those mess committees would be the responsibility of individual mess committees; that there would no longer be any subvention of the provision of food to prison officers; and that they would need to be self-sustaining.