Ms Nicola Perry:

What places of detention are and what they may or may not look like has been referenced several times by committee members today. The detail is not there for us to understand what it really looks like. The situation at present is that people are moved to a prison setting immediately prior to deportation. Would Safetynet be able to access that location to provide healthcare at that time? There would have to be a complete rethink of the system. There would be capacity issues. If it were not an organisation such as ours and it fell into mainstream health services, there would be significant problems because the reason an organisation such as Safetynet exists and is funded by mainstream healthcare, the HSE and the Department of Health is that we can provide services that are culturally appropriate and trauma informed. We are cognisant of the huge variety in the groups we work with. We do this because it is difficult to do through mainstream healthcare services because we are dealing with the marginalised. Even outside of this, if it were not in a prison setting, it would bring its own problems and capacities.

The Prison Service is stretched to capacity. Speaking from personal work experience, I know that if there was a significant increase in this cohort, I do not know how they would manage that.

In terms of detention centres and accommodation centres, we still have issues, whether it is ourselves or someone else, trying to provide healthcare. We have issues around location, accessibility and whether sites are fit for purpose. When people are put into places, not only is there no health promotion, there is health disimprovement. We have had direct experience of patients being put into rooms that have no windows, ventilation or natural light and in which there is mould. People can leave those centres less healthy than when they arrived and had no intrinsic health problems.

I do not know what legal counselling is either, like many other people in this room, but if it is something along the lines of a generic pick-up and catch-all, for that to work with a homogenous group would be a stretch of the imagination. I do not see how it would have any chance of working with groups of people from different cultural backgrounds, with different languages or cultural norms. For example, our counselling service alone in the past 12 months saw 36 different nationalities. That is just one example of one small organisation.