Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 10 December 2020
Public Accounts Committee
2019 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 21 - Prisons
Chapter 7 – Catering and Ancillary Services in Prisons
11:30 am
Mr. Fergal Black:
To answer the Deputy's question, psychologists are assigned across the service. We undertook a root and branch review. We got an international expert, Dr. Frank Porporino, from Canada to look at our psychology service in 2015. Our agenda going forward from that was to grow the psychology service and look at more specialist activities. Obviously psychologists now are more embedded within our organisation. They fundamentally deal with risk information and offending behaviour but they also deal with mental health. They are the two streams that they work in but within that we now have specialist services for lifers, violent prisoners serving over two years and sex offenders. We have moved to specialise our interventions and moved away from just one to one or very extensive group work to ensure that we provide a much broader service to prisoners.
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