Ms Saoirse Brady:

That is one of the things I was going to mention. The Bill was published one week and then the public consultation on prison visiting committees was published the following week. We had to do two submissions at the same time so we were very aware of it. The question is why is there so much detail in the heads of Bill on the prison visiting committees when the Department is having a public consultation. Should that not have informed the direction of the legislation? There is a real value in prison visiting committees but what we really want to see this legislation do is that reform piece, to have consistency across the board and to have transparency around them.

I have spoken to a number of people who have been appointed to prison visiting committees. They were not even aware of what the process was because there is not necessarily a clear appointments process. That is something that needs to be looked at. Also, we would question whether prison visiting committees should fall under the remit of the new inspectorate of places of detention, because that will require extra resources and extra expertise. It will be quite resource intensive and I think we will probably lose something in terms of the independence when it comes between the two.

I have another point on that piece. Currently, as it as it drafted, there will be a composite report for all the prison visiting committee reports that go into the inspectorate. We would lose a lot from that because no prison is the same. We might see some trends but we would lose the current issues that are coming up within a particular prison.