Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I suppose it is also a judgment call and this does not only relate to criminal cases.

It is important to be available to attend, although whether it is necessary to attend every occasion is a question. It is also very important to be able to attend childcare proceedings, in particular. Personally, I would prioritise being able to attend childcare proceedings, where a person's family is at stake, over every remand appearance, as it were, in the Courts Service. That is my observation, but I believe it is important to highlight it because I have such a short amount of time, although I can come back in.

A particular concern, and this is quite a big question, is the status of women in the prison system generally. There are only approximately 200 in the population, and I thank the witnesses for the opportunity to visit the Dóchas Centre yesterday. The profile of the people there is very different. The nature of offences that have been committed, the addiction issues and the mental health issues are replicated across the male prison population, but the scale of violence that has been visited on many of the women who have ended up in the Dóchas Centre and get to the point where they are there, and many of them have committed non-violent offences and have very significant trauma issues, is a massive concern. Clearly, addiction and mental health issues are primary issues in the male prison population as well, but I have a particular concern about whether the model that is used in the Dóchas Centre, and I do not mean to blame the Dóchas Centre or Limerick, is the appropriate model for providing support to women who overwhelmingly need addiction, mental health and other health needs addressed in the first instance. Is there something different that is a more health-based model? Is there something different that is a more open-prison model that we can look at to provide more supportive services for a group of people who are very excluded from their families as much as from their broader communities?