Mr. John Clinton:

Prison officers were compelled to work overtime on their days off. There was no choice as to whether one came into work. If the governor required a body on the ground, he could compel a prison officer to come to work tomorrow on overtime. Therefore, one could be made work up to 60, 70 or 80 hours per week if the prison or the institution where one worked needed one. We took a case in this regard to the High Court in the early 1980s, which went to the Supreme Court. The case involved a female prison officer in Limerick Prison who was pregnant at the time and the State ruled that the governor of the prison had the authority to compel any prison officer to work overtime. That is still the case today. We now do it by a different mechanism, known as additional hours, which evolved from the 2005 agreement. There is not the same recourse to compulsory overtime now that we had in those days.