Ms Saoirse Brady:

I thank the Deputy for the question. I will come in on a couple of the points. There are a couple of opportunities here. We are know we are in the last months of this Government's term but there was a commitment in the programme for Government to ratify the optional protocol to the convention against torture. The legislation to pave the way to do that has been introduced. It was published in August 2022. I presented before the Joint Committee on Justice in October of that year. The committee published its report in March 2023. The legislation in question is the inspection of places of detention Bill and it has not moved since. The Bill would really help.

We also have the Irish Prison Service Bill, which I mentioned during my presentation. One of the criticisms we have of the legislation is that a culture committee is not named. Only the heads of the Bill have been published so there is still a lot of opportunity for change. We think the cultural piece is key to addressing many of the issues in prisons, not only for Travellers but right across the board.

The review of the prison rules has been ongoing since 2019. We know that work has been done in that regard. There was a commitment to prioritising the complaints process. Nobody has faith in the current complaints process. Nobody will make complaints because they are afraid of what might happen to them.

Even if they did, they do not see redress or an outcome. Even the Irish Prison Service has been critical of the complaints process. We know that the Office of the Inspector of Prisons, the Irish Prison Service and the Office of the Ombudsman have discussed putting in place a more robust complaints system. We had a conference recently around "know your rights in prison". Ciara O'Connell was there, who I think just finished as a senior inspector with the Office of the Inspector of Prisons. She spoke about the importance of having an independent, robust complaints system. She also spoke about how those three bodies have come together and put proposals to the Department of Justice on what the complaints system might look like. We need to prioritise this and get it done sooner rather than later.

If the committee is going to write to the Department of Justice about Barnardos, we did research published last year. It was a scoping study on maternal imprisonment. It also examined Traveller mothers in prison and found that Traveller women in prison were more likely to be mothers, to be mothers at a younger age, to have more children and their children, unfortunately, were more likely to be in care. We have that evidence and can send it to the committee if that would be helpful to bolster support for that ask.