Ms Caron McCaffrey:

Education forms a huge part of the regimes in place in our prisons. On participation rates, over 40% of the prison population engage in education, and this is delivered in a variety of ways. Looking at our prison population today, the average age a person left school is 13.9 years, so education has a huge role to play. The Department of Education provides us with 220 whole-time equivalent teachers, and that is a huge investment on its part in our prisons. We support education with a budget in excess of €1 million. This is used to buy supplies and whatever might be required to ensure that we have appropriate supplies in place. I have visited every education centre in all of our prisons and they are hugely vibrant learning areas. Our teachers are very committed and they are part of the fabric of our prisons, and the men and women in prison are benefiting significantly from the investment in education in our prisons.