Mr. Noel Waters:

I will give an overview and then I will call on my colleagues from the Prison Service.

The level of overtime running during that period in the 2000s was escalating at a rapid rate. The bill for overtime had risen from €54 million, up to €55 million, culminating at €59 million in the space of a couple of years, which gave rise to very serious difficulties in the entire justice sector in meeting a bill of that level every year. The money allocated for other services and in other subheads had to be diverted to pay the overtime bill. During that period, as I said in my opening remarks, the overtime for the Garda Síochána was about €65 million. There were about 3,000 officers in the Prison Service, whereas the number of members of the Garda Síochána was much larger. Clearly the issue of overtime had to be resolved as it was not sustainable.

A review of the figures from 1997 up to the early 2000s was conducted to see if there could be a better way of organising the service. They looked at four different options, namely, hiring more staff, time off in lieu, trying to curtail the overtime system and the annualised hours system. They came down in favour of the annualised hours, and this was approved by a Minister and everybody else in the system. They went into each prison and looked at the number of hours required to run the prison, came up with a global figure - and my colleagues can elaborate on that - of rostered hours and overtime hours that it would take to run the Prison Service right across all the individual institutions. I believe 16 institutions may have been in operation at that time. That global figure ultimately fed its way into the €31 million saving which was identified at that time and was based on an expenditure of €59 million in overtime. In subsequent years that overtime bill fell back to €46 million.

I ask Mr. Donnellan to give Deputy MacSharry a flavour of how the numbers that arose came about.