Mr. John Clinton:

When we were in negotiations on the Haddington Road agreement, we asked that St. Patrick's Institution be utilised as a building for protection prisoners. If they were put in an area on their own, they could have a greater regime. The Prison Service is now stating it is looking at the concept of putting them into a super-enhanced facility. That is the plan in this regard.

On the staffing question, the Deputy is right. Everything is resource based so if we are meant to have 200 prison officers on duty in the building on a given day but we only have 160, then there has to be a hit somewhere in the system. It operates either through diminishing task lines under the health and safety legislation or through a regime management plan. That plan would be designed for safety reasons. However, it does mean that we cannot give the services that we want to give. It is within that context that we raised the Villabona project in Spain. The man who designed that project, Mr. Faustino Zapico García, was brought over here during the lifetime of the last Government, when the Taoiseach was having his meetings about reinvigorating Ireland. We were introduced to him through Ashoka Ireland and the late Dr. Mary Redmond. He showed us figures from the Spanish prison system for his Units of Therapy and Education, UTE, project which is run within the building of a normal prison in Spain. He could run his UTE project with half of the staffing levels of the main prison. He managed to bring in a system where prisoner-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-staff violence went down to practically zero. In the Spanish prison system generally, there was a 75% re-offending rate. The most important element of his system was that the re-offending rate among those prisoners who went through the UTE project was down to 10%. When he gave us those facts and figures, we thought that they were so interesting that we brought him over here to share them with our other colleagues across Europe. He seems to have hit on something that is revolutionary in the prison system.