Dr. Emma Regan:

The Irish Prison Service directly employs the majority of the psychologists who work with us. In each closed prison there is now a senior psychologist who manages a number of psychologists and assistant psychologists, who are an unqualified grade and starting their training.

We recently employed somebody on a part-time basis to work in the open centres, which is a new departure for us and really positive in terms of supporting people with primary care mental health difficulties. In the open centres of Shelton Abbey and Loughan House we have 12 senior psychologist posts agreed, 24 psychologists and 14 assistant psychologist posts. As things currently stand because of challenges in recruiting psychologists nationally, we have nine psychologists, 10.4 senior psychologists and 14 assistant psychologists. We have planned a very significant recruitment drive for this May and annually from now on in order to boost the number of psychologists. Also, for the first time in ten years, we started sponsoring the training of psychologists in conjunction with the HSE. So the HSE sponsors the majority of people who train as psychologists in the various universities across Ireland. The Irish Prison Service has now joined that and we sponsor two people with University College Cork. Those people will come on board and will be contracted to work with us for three years after their training. We plan for another two people next September.

The waiting list remains an ongoing challenge, particularly in large prisons like the Midlands Prison. Recruiting psychologists to work in the Midlands Prison has always been a big challenge, which is why the two new student psychologists are contracted to work there once they qualify.

I agree with the Deputy that the waiting list poses challenges. In general, a prisoner must wait anything from six months to a year to see a psychologist. Considering that many of the prison population are serving sentence of under a year then waiting so long becomes a real problem and we end up having to try to refer people out into the community again.