Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

I will come in on that and one other issue raised by the Deputy. I realise the Chairman is under time pressure, so I will be brief. There was one anonymous protected disclosure on sexual harassment. Again, a private law firm was engaged to examine the case. That report was received in November and was shared with the Prison Service. As a result, certain undertakings have been given to the Department about procedures in the Prison Service, especially under the new dignity at work policy that I mentioned earlier.

On the Deputy's other question about prisons becoming the new asylums and the relationship between mental health and crime, the Deputy has touched on what is one of the single most important issues we are facing in criminal justice. This is not just in Ireland, but affects every country. The report of the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland by Kathleen O'Toole is very much focused on this issue. It points out, for example, that the average policeman or policewoman in a developed country - it is not exclusive to Ireland - spends 75% of his or her time dealing with vulnerable people and 25% of the time on dealing with actual crime. It is also true that a large number of people who arrive into prison have drug or mental health problems. I do not have precise figures, but in a recent visit to one prison, the governor estimated it at 75%.

This relationship that the Deputy has touched on between mental health, drug abuse and crime is crucial. The solution to this lies partly in the way we run the prisons but it primarily arises before an individual ever reaches the door of a prison. It is also about how we do policing in particular. One of the key points about the Kathleen O'Toole report is that it does not just look at the work of the Garda Síochána. It looks at policing under a much broader frame and it binds together a view of the enforcement agencies, those being the Garda, the Irish Prison Service, and the Probation Service, the health services, the social services and so on. The report proposes a joined-up approach to that. The high-level implementation committee for that plan includes the Departments of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Health, Housing, Planning and Local Government and so on. The high-level committee is at Secretary General level and includes my colleagues in those Departments and me as the Secretary General of the Department of Justice and Equality. This is a fundamentally new way of looking at criminal justice in the State and it is very promising.

Other programmes that we have rolled out, including those that relate to community release, have been very successful in this space. A very successful programme that has won an innovation award in the Civil Service is called the joint agency response to crime, JARC, project. It has run a number of different pilot projects now and is highly successful. Again, it wraps all the various services together into dealing with people who have a high propensity to offend. These are people who are repeat offenders but have been identified as possibly likely to benefit from a more caring approach rather than a discipline approach. The Deputy has touched on what I would regard as perhaps the most exciting development in criminal justice in Ireland at the moment.