Ms Oonagh McPhillips:

Before I start, I will take a moment to pay tribute to An Garda Síochána and Garda colleagues on the front line who have been dealing with very dangerous situations in the past couple of nights. They have responded with typical courage and professionalism. I also think of the vulnerable child who is the alleged victim of a crime and her family. That matter is now before the courts so I will not say anything more specific about it. However, the violence we have seen this week, as others have said in the House this week, cannot be viewed as some kind of legitimate reaction to that crime. I send my best wishes to the gardaí who have sustained injuries in the past two nights. I hope they are recovering well. They are not major injuries, but even a minor injury can have a lifelong tail on it sometimes, so I am thinking of them. I also thank our team in Citywest. I am conscious of the impact this has had on all the people living, working, going to school and so on in Citywest. A mix of international protection applicants and Ukrainians reside in the facility. There are up to 400 families with children. I am also thinking of all the residents in the area who have nothing to do with this type of manipulation and violence. We have been engaging with local residents and listening to their concerns in the past few months. They are decent law-abiding people and I realise this has been a difficult week for them as well. I thank the Chair for indulging me with that.

I thank the committee for the invitation to discuss the 2024 appropriation accounts for Vote 24 - justice, and Vote 21 - prisons, along with the 2024 expenditure in Vote 40, which has since been transferred to the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, and three chapters from the Comptroller and Auditor General’s 2022 and 2024 reports on the accounts of the public service. I will share my time with Ms McCaffrey, director general of the Irish Prison Service. I thank the Comptroller and Auditor General and his office for their valuable work in auditing the appropriation accounts and on the reports on the accounts of the public services.

In 2024, the justice Vote was one of six in the sector, as the Comptroller and Auditor General said, and supported a broad range of public services delivered by the Department and its agencies. More than 4,000 people worked in the Department and agencies funded from the Vote, serving the Government and the public. Staffing increased from 3,542 people in 2023 to 4,197 people in 2024, reflecting both organisational growth and the scale of the Department’s responsibilities. This growth was particularly directed towards managing our busy immigration services.

Working towards our vision of a safe, fair and inclusive Ireland means that diversity and inclusion is centrally important across all levels. Women accounted for 59% of staff in 2024, with a majority at nearly every grade and near equality in the management board, narrowing our gender pay gap to 1.27% in 2024. There was also wider representation of colleagues with disabilities, a growing variety of ethnic backgrounds and from the LGBT+ community. Where comparable data is available, the Department of justice ranks very strongly on all these markers.

The Department’s net expenditure in 2024 was €506 million, including €10 million in capital investment. Our largest ever project, the new Forensic Science Ireland laboratory in Backweston, Kildare, was officially opened in 2024. It is a world-class facility providing vital support to the criminal justice system. The Department prioritised important modernisation programmes throughout the year, supported by investment in technology and innovation. Major programmes included improving our cyber resilience, immigration services and international protection processing. The criminal justice operational hub continued to develop provision of a secure digital method for co-operation to replace paper and manual processes across the criminal justice system. The Department is committed to further strengthening project management, reporting and accountability processes, as recommended by the Comptroller and Auditor General in his review of this important programme.

Expenditure was managed across two programmes in the Vote, criminal justice and civil justice, which includes immigration. After the transfer of functions completed in May and June of this year, the Department gained responsibility for cybersecurity policy and the National Cyber Security Centre, and the areas of integration and accommodation for international protection applicants and people fleeing the war in Ukraine. The Department advanced major legislative reform during the year.

The Policing, Security and Community Safety Act 2024 was a fairly comprehensive transformation of policing and security over the course of the year. The Act established a number of important new bodies but beyond these structural changes, it also provides for community safety as a shared responsibility across the Government and seeks to strengthen co-ordination between policing, health, education, housing and local authorities to address the underlying causes of crime. A director of the new National Office for Community Safety was appointed in September 2024. The office plays a central role in rolling out and supporting the 36 new local community safety partnerships, LCSPs, to be established and is providing support, training and guidance to local authorities to enhance safety in communities across Ireland. It will also administer the community safety fund, which had an allocation of €3.75 million in 2024, rising to €4 million this year and to €4.75 million in 2026, supporting projects to prevent crime and strengthen resilience.

The Youth Justice Strategy 2021-2027 also progressed strongly, with funding of €30 million in 2024, rising to €33.2 million this year, supporting youth diversion projects nationwide. We will achieve full national coverage in this important area by the end of this year, again supported by further investment. These initiatives play a vital role in supporting youth workers on the front line to divert young people from crime and support them to address their destructive behaviour.

Tackling domestic, sexual and gender-based violence is a core priority under the whole-of-government zero tolerance strategy. The Department worked with partners to establish Cuan, the new statutory agency leading the national response which was established in January 2024. The agency has a strong board and enthusiastic team and I am very proud of the work they are leading across the Government, co-ordinating refuge provision, victim support, prevention and awareness programmes and providing services.

In the 12-month period to April of this year, the Central Statistics Office recorded that almost 125,300 people moved to Ireland. This includes 31,500 returning Irish citizens and 30,200 arrivals from the UK and EU countries. Approximately 50% came from other countries such as India and Brazil to work or study. They make enormously positive contributions to our society and economy and play vital roles in sectors like healthcare, home care, construction, technology, retail, hospitality and transport.

During 2024, the Department took over full responsibility for renewing immigration permissions, which had traditionally been a task undertaken by An Garda Síochána in Garda stations around the country. This represented a major milestone in modernising immigration services. It allowed a more streamlined approach while freeing gardaí to concentrate on front-line policing and immigration enforcement measures.

Each year, people arrive in Ireland seeking refuge and protection under international law. Those who apply for international protection are entitled to basic needs, such as accommodation, under Irish and EU law. Between 2022 and 2024, 159,000 people arrived in Ireland seeking either temporary or international protection, including 114,000 who fled the war in Ukraine. This placed exceptional demands on the State’s protection and accommodation systems and required a major operational scale-up. While pressures remain, the system delivered much faster decisions in 2024 and handled new applications more effectively. We have stabilised things further in 2025. The International Protection Office, IPO, continued to expand its capacity and improve efficiency. Investment in digitisation, re-engineered processes and additional staffing transformed its operations. Staffing more than tripled from 143 people in 2019 to 620 people in 2024. The IPO delivered over 14,000 first-instance decisions in 2024 compared with 8,500 in 2023 and is on target to decide over 20,000 cases this year. The International Protection Appeals Tribunal, IPAT, closed 3,100 appeals last year, almost double the number in the previous year. These results reflect strong progress following sustained investment, progress that we have continued to build upon this year.

I want to specifically address the accommodation services for international protection applicants. The State had to respond to a sudden and intense surge in asylum applications from over 55,000 people in the past four years, which coincided with the arrival of more than 114,000 people from Ukraine, as I already said.

A massive effort across both the Ukraine and international protection accommodation teams was required and a lot was asked of public services and communities across Ireland. Teams of civil and public servants across a range of Departments and agencies worked really hard during this period to deliver services and increase bed spaces from 7,000 to 27,000, expanding IPAS accommodation capacity, very rapidly, in a very restricted sector. The profound shortages of accommodation persisted throughout that period and from the end of 2023, the State was unable to offer accommodation to all international protection applicants in line with its legal duty. This led to instances of unaccommodated applicants and while most applicants were not rough-sleeping, the numbers waiting for an offer rose to a peak of 3,500 people in March 2025. The crisis period meant that emergency sourcing of a wide range of accommodation options was essential. This is in part why we now have a much larger system than we needed in 2021, but also why it expanded into further commercial provision and parts of the system were not brought on in the ideal configurations, nor at the value for public money we could expect to achieve in more normal times.

Since taking responsibility for this service in May of this year, and as application numbers have dropped, the Department has focused on speeding up applications, increasing returns, and reducing the size and costs of the commercial accommodation system, including by developing more State-owned accommodation solutions. We have made good progress, as outlined in the response to the Comptroller and Auditor General's report on these services, introducing an extensive set of new procedures, payment controls and contracting processes. These measures are already delivering improved value for money to the State. As the committee is aware, the Government has prioritised reform of this system, with a focus on reducing costs, making applications quicker and increasing the number of returns when applications are unsuccessful, all the while maintaining fair procedures.

The Department maintained strong oversight of our many agencies in 2024 through formal governance and performance agreements that set clear expectations while respecting operational independence. Funding and resource requirements were managed in close collaboration with the Department of public expenditure and I would like to thank my colleagues there.

Last year also saw the conclusion of the Stardust inquests and the introduction of a compensation scheme which I hope has brought some degree of solace to the families of the 48 young people who were unlawfully killed in 1981. I thank my colleagues on the inquest team and all those who worked so hard to support the families.

I am happy to go into further detail as members require but will hand over now to Ms McCaffrey.