Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

I welcome the opportunity to meet the committee to discuss the 2017 appropriation account for prisons Vote. I propose to keep my opening remarks brief and hand over to the newly appointed director general of the Prison Service, Ms Caron McCaffrey, who will also make a brief opening statement. The Prison Service is a key component of the criminal justice system and its voted expenditure is directed towards one strategic programme - the provision of safe, secure, humane and rehabilitative custody for people sent to prison. As the Comptroller and Auditor General said, the gross expenditure for the Vote in 2017 was €326.9 million, of which 71% related to payroll costs, 22% related to non-pay current expenditure and 7% or €22.8 million was capital.

The Prison Service currently operates 12 prisons. There were 9,287 committals to prisons with a daily average of 3,680 prisoners in custody during 2017. In total there were 3,186 staff in the Prison Service at the end of 2017.

The Prison Service operates as an executive office of the Department of Justice and Equality within a statutory framework and policy parameters established by the Minister. The practical effect is that while the Secretary General of the day is the Accounting Officer for the Vote, the director general of the Prison Service and her team carry out the day-to-day operation of the prison system. Each year, the director general of the Prison Service and the assistant secretary in charge of prisons and probation policy agree and sign an oversight and performance agreement. This commits to a minimum of two formal governance meetings per year. Further, this is subject to a yearly review by the agency governance oversight subgroup of the Department of Justice and Equality, which conducts an annual governance overview of the bodies under the aegis of the Department and reports to the management board on any key issues arising or matters of concern.

The committee may wish to note that a number of reports over the years have recommended greater autonomy for the Prison Service from the Department. Recent reports in this regard include a report from the Inspector of Prisons of November 2015. The effectiveness and renewal group, ERG, recommended in 2018 that the Government examine converting the operational elements of the Irish Prison Service into a separate agency and the ERG may return to this issue in its next report which is due shortly. In part, what is generally envisaged is that the director general would become the appropriate authority for issues relating to staff management including disciplinary matters and possibly the Accounting Officer for expenditure on the prisons Vote. These matters are being pursued with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and in order to give them effect they will involve legislative change. This approach is consistent with the review of the governance relationship with our agencies which is taking place alongside the very significant transformation programme in the Department which I am currently leading. I am pleased to inform the committee that this project is under way with the major restructuring of the Department to be completed over the next nine months.

Penal policy is constantly evolving and the Department and its agencies continue to work towards implementing the recommendations of the penal policy review group. The recommendations of this body emphasised, among other things, the importance of interagency co-operation in the development and implementation of penal policy.

I will briefly address certain matters which have been receiving attention recently in relation to the Prison Service. A court affidavit by a serving prison officer makes allegations about activities in the Prison Service, including unauthorised surveillance. Notwithstanding that it was the subject of a newspaper article, that affidavit has not yet been opened in court and so its details cannot be publicly discussed. The committee will be aware that because the Minister was of the view that the publication of these allegations created a public concern, he asked the Inspector of Prisons to carry out an urgent preliminary investigation to determine the facts as far as possible and report to him. The investigation is now under way and we await its outcome.

I am also aware also that the committee recently met a prison officer in private session on certain matters, which I assume included reference to a protected disclosure made by the officer in question. As there are ongoing issues relating to this case, including matters before the courts, we cannot comment on the specifics of the case during today’s proceedings. However, with regard to protected disclosures generally, the Department put in place a protected disclosure policy in 2015 in accordance with the requirements of the Act. The procedures were updated in 2018 to provide for external independent assessment and investigation of disclosures made by Department staff.

Over the past three years, the Department has also engaged Transparency International Ireland, TII, to provide advice and support to disclosers and also participates in TII’s integrity at work initiative which facilitates the Department and its agencies to learn about best practice at multi-stakeholder forums and annual conferences as well as testing and developing existing policies and procedures on whistleblowing.

I will hand over at this point to the director general, Caron McCaffrey.