Ms Saoirse Brady:

Some other things are relevant to this, one of which is Tusla, which Barnardos mentioned. In the Irish Penal Reform Trust, we have a children and families initiative. It was kind of what started the conversation between Barnardos and the Traveller Justice Initiative. A reason we have that project is to focus on children impacted by family imprisonment and parental imprisonment in particular. We have an estimate of how many children are impacted; we think it is 6,000 at any given time but it could be up to 10,000. Thankfully, in Young Ireland, the new national policy framework for children and young people, for the first time, those children are named as a cohort. Three actions are aligned to them, one of which is to collect the data. I am talking about data again but it is important. We cannot develop proper services unless we know who we are dealing with. A lot of those children are invisible. We have been talking about them in terms of the child poverty conversation. When someone goes to prison and their partner is left behind to mind the family, they are then lone parents but they may not be entitled to a payment for six months, for example. Tusla does not know how many children it is dealing with in care who have a parent in prison.

We would love for it to keep that data. The other thing we would love for it to do concerns toolkits which have been developed by Sarah Beresford of Prison Reform Trust in the UK. It is around a child-rights impact assessment for children going to prison. She has two different toolkits, one for when a mother goes to prison and one for when a father goes to prison. She developed those with young people. Those toolkits could be adapted in Ireland. We have been talking to Tusla about this to try to get it to take this up. It would be particularly powerful. The children with whom Sarah Beresford worked said that when their parents go to prison, they are asked at the very beginning whether they want contact with them. Sometimes, the children are so angry, upset or frustrated by what has happened that they say "No". They are not asked again. Relationships then need to be rebuilt and developed. That is one side of things.

Another thing to note – and this is a positive development – is that, for the first time ever, the Irish Prison Service has recently recruited a family connections officer. Since 1 July, Marita Costigan has started as a family connections officer employed by the Irish Prison Service. She is the only person for the whole prison estate, however.

Another action in the Young Ireland policy is to develop a visiting policy. We talked about the six-minute phone calls earlier. We also have to think about the limited access to family visits, the fact that people have to travel across the country taking their children out of school, because visiting hours are not family friendly, and the cost of all of that on people. We were recently contacted by a Traveller woman who told us about her partner who was placed in a prison on the other side of the country. As she did not drive, she had to get a bus. When she got to where the bus left her off, she still had to get a taxi, which cost more than €200 return. Her husband was then transferred to a Dublin-based prison, believing that would be easier. When she arrived in Dublin with her four children, one of whom has additional needs, she had to cut the prison visit short after four hours of travelling because that child became so distressed and apparently disturbed other people’s visits. We are talking about children going through prison security. That can be distressing for any one of us, never mind for a non-verbal child. While we understand the pressure on the prison system and the impact it might have on others, we need to be more creative.

We carried out a survey with our members in prison, one of whom – and we sought permission to speak about the issues he raised – said the Irish Prison Service accommodates his child with additional needs coming into the prison, but that it is not very regular because of the pressures, unfortunately. We need to look at that piece and make visiting much more family friendly. There are opportunities here to do it, but we need to build on them. We need to properly resource the Irish Prison Service to do the family piece. It is not only good for the children, the parents and everyone involved, but it is also the golden thread to stop reoffending. There is a public policy piece in this regard we need to address.