Ms Saoirse Brady:

I feel as though I am hogging it but I will come in. There are a couple of things we could do. I think Deputy Ó Cuív has just read out our pre-budget submission, to be honest. We have called for a bail supervision scheme for women as a pilot scheme. We have costed it at around €300,000. This works really effectively in the youth justice system. Multidisciplinary teams are brought in that work with the young person and family. It has such benefits for everyone. I know the Deputy was at the briefing in the audiovisual room when someone from Extern presented on that. That is a small cost. We think if it could be tried as a pilot project for women first and then extended out to 18 to 24-year-olds, that could be something really practical. It has been proven to work in Scotland and other places so there is evidence to support that.

Where people are in for short sentences, those are really for survival crimes. We are seeing more people coming into prison from homelessness and out again into homelessness. We need to address that piece. There was a criminal justice aspect to Housing First. It has been mainstreamed. Again, our pre-budget submission looked at how to use the evaluation of the Housing First for criminal justice to ensure that more people are supported when they leave prison because we have heard from women that they walk out the gate of the Dóchas Centre with all their belongings in a plastic bag and they feel as though everyone knows where they have come from. They look left or right and they do not know where to turn. They are going to emergency accommodation for the night. There is an issue there around overcrowding overall, and particularly in the men’s prisons, although the women’s seem more overcrowded more regularly. However, the Minister for Justice gave a recent figure of 245 people sleeping on mattresses on the floor. That is in a cell they are sharing with somebody else with a toilet that they all have to use. These are degrading conditions that people are in. One way we could look at reducing overcrowding is not only tackling short sentences but also the number on remand and pretrial detention. Currently it roughly one in five are in pretrial detention. We do no know why that is. The Courts Service cannot tell us why that is either from its data. We do not know if that is because of the affordability of bail. Yes, some people will need to be remanded into custody because they post a flight risk or they may reoffend or intimidate witnesses but I do not imagine that is nearly 1,000 people.