Mr. Niall Mulligan:

I will take that question. It was a challenge, there is no doubt about it. There were no Covid-19 cases in the Irish Prison Service or in Irish prisons for a long period of the pandemic. One of the reasons behind that was that the access that we would normally have as an organisation was not available, and rightly so. It left us in difficulty, because the scheme we operate in the Irish Prison Service is about training up inmates to give peer support to their fellow inmates. However, the inmates carried on doing that anyway. Over a period of time, we organised supporting our listeners within the prison via the medium of Zoom, etc. While it was not ideal, it was the best that we and Irish Prison Service could do. The Irish Prison Service was hugely supportive of us trying to be innovative in how we supported listeners in the prisons.

Another thing that came about was a pilot scheme within some of the prisons around having in-cell phones, from which prisoners could ring the Samaritans and seek support. We saw in the impact report that there was a significant increase in prisoners calling the Samaritans.