Mr. Michael Donnellan:

The annualised hours are broken into four quarters. Each prison operates over four quarters. Resources and money are allocated to a prison for each quarter. We have to depend on the prison to operate these hours in the most efficient way, taking account of all the pressures it will encounter. I will give an example. If a prisoner is in hospital for an operation, nine officers will be required over a 24 hour cycle. This draws significantly from that budget. At any one time four or five prisoners in the Dublin region could be in hospital for dialysis, for example, or following a heart attack. It is challenging for governors to manage this. We are facing that challenge in a much more realistic way by budgeting across the quarter in order that we manage to get to the end of the quarter. We are running the prisons and our services in a safe way. However, it is not a perfect system. Clearly, it is structured in a way that allows everybody to know how it works.