Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

At the beginning, we asked how many people are on duty full-time. The numbers were given. We picked a speculative 1,000. We then took a third of the three prisons off that and suggested a figure of 940. Let us go really low and say there are 940 people at a €3 spend per day, below the lowest amount, and multiply that by 365, that is approximately €1.2 million. If we then remove 556 per day, there are still hundreds of thousands in profit, especially when it is known that staff, heat, light and equipment are, anecdotally, subsidised from the service's own resources. Even if we assume that it is not, there are still major profits, with no audit, no oversight, no accounting, that the Comptroller and Auditor General does not get to look at it and that the Department of Justice and Equality does not look at it. All we know is that Mr. O'Driscoll is so frustrated with my effrontery in raising such a matter that it just does not suit him and he wants to send me a note on it.

These things need to be in the public domain because it is not good. Prison officers are entitled to their full entitlements. The director general said that after a long industrial relations negotiation, this was agreed. That is fine if it is an entitlement but we do not know how much it is. To an unqualified person who can simply add, as opposed to being a chartered accountant, it seems to me that there is a lot of money flying around beyond the actual costs, especially when the overhead is free. That puts Templemore in the ha'penny place. If it was part of a negotiation that it was to be this obscure and not for profit, then where is the profit going, because it is clearly profitable? What does the Chairman think?