Professor Gautam Gulati:

I thank the Deputy. He has raised a number of points which I might take one at a time. On the first aspect of people knowing their rights, that is absolutely critical and brings us to the heart of the UNCRPD, which is accessibility of information. When a person is arrested in Ireland, he or she is given a notice of rights. That notice of rights was developed in the 1980s and has not been changed since. If you put it through a calculator like a Flesch Kincaid calculator, which looks at the reading age required to understand a document, it is clear that you need to be a college graduate to understand that notice of rights. The reading age of the general population is not as high. One of the ways to address that is to change that notice of rights to make it more accessible for people who might have an intellectual disability or a different reading age or might have a different type of disability. We started that work, in fact we have done that work. We work with three individuals with an intellectual disability in St. Joseph's Foundation, Charleville, and we have redesigned that notice of rights for Ireland. It has been published and it has been submitted to the Garda Commissioner for consideration because it has been legally checked out and signed off on as being accessible for people with an intellectual disability. It will be nice to see that in use in Garda stations because if one does not know that one has the right to remain silent or the right to a solicitor, everything there is a bit more tricky. Likewise, accessibility of information in prisons is a challenge.

The Deputy mentioned cases of individuals with dementia. Ireland has an ageing population and it is troubling to see more individuals with dementia coming into Irish prisons. In the last few months I met a man in prison who is in his 70s and it is his first time in prison. He clearly has very significant dementia. He is kept in a specific vulnerable prisoners' unit for his own protection. At 10 o'clock at night when the doors close behind you, is a very frightening moment for anyone but every night, the last question he asked the prison guards was at what time was his wife coming up to bed. Whose interest does it serve to incarcerate people in this situation? It was a relatively minor offence I might add. To arrange care pathways afterwards becomes very challenging also because a person having been a prisoner carries a label.

Ireland has an ageing population and we have to be careful that this diversion at the policing stage is put in or at least, that it is correctly resourced and actioned in order that we do not have people with significant dementia coming in to our prisons. The third point that the Deputy quite rightly made concerned the resourcing of hospitals. A lot of work has been done in this regard by my colleague, Professor Brendan Kelly, in Trinity College and one of the statistics that he quotes regularly is that Ireland has the third-lowest number of mental health beds per capita in the European Union. It also has - this is a good thing - one of the lowest rates of involuntary hospitalisation in Europe. On the number of beds. nobody is saying we need to return to the days of the old asylums. That was not a good place to be in but resourcing of hospitals needs to be stronger. There are people who bring themselves to the attention of the guards late at night saying they are very unwell. They have not committed an offence but they present to Garda stations saying they are very unwell and need help and assistance.