Mr. Fergal Black:

To answer Deputy Joan Collins's question, we have more work to do to prevent discrimination. That is the honest answer. I meant to say to Deputy Ellis that one of the reasons we chose Castlerea was that in our last ethnicity survey across all the prisons, Castlerea had 95 prisoners who identified as Travellers. That was 31.5% of the population, which is an indictment of the over-representation of Travellers in our criminal justice system.

On complaints, it is not an area I am responsible for but substantial work has been completed on staff training and the integrated IT system. There is a draft policy on complaints handling and there is engagement with the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel to give legal effect to the new complaints system. Will it happen this year? I do not think it will happen this calendar year. There is an issue with resourcing the new complaints system which is yet to be finalised.

On the non-custodial options, we deal with people sent from the courts. On the other end, in terms of the back-door arrangement, there are the community support and community return schemes we run jointly with our colleagues in probation. I have statistics on Traveller participants. Of the 599 people serving sentences of less than a year who were released on a structured release programme last year under the community support scheme, 55 were Travellers. I do not believe there is any bias against Travellers in that. The statistics I have on education participation from our prison education system are positive as regards the number of Travellers engaging in education.