Professor Harry Kennedy:

It is a complex mix. The national forensic mental health service, which provides multidisciplinary teams, is a HSE service. The drugs in-reach service is a HSE service. The psychology service is provided by the Irish Prison Service. Primary care, general practitioners and general nurses are provided by the IPS and we work in a multi-agency way. For example, probation is a criminal justice service but with social work background and increasingly we are providing mental health social workers as well as part of a pre-release plan. It is a really complex interagency service at which we are fairly good.

On Travellers, following a report by the IPRT a number of years ago, we have worked with the St. Stephen's Green Trust about a Travellers in prisons initiative. We have been working with the national Traveller organisations and one of their key points was that if Travellers are not counted in prison, they will not matter. We have agreed to take a real census of every person who comes into prison and ask them for their ethnic origin. We did a pilot at the Dóchas centre at Castlerea and 30% of prisoners on a given day last month identified themselves as white Travellers. We intend to continue that survey and by October have all prisons done. We will have a scientific fact for how many Travellers occupy prisons, and it seems to be disproportionate. Travellers make up 0.6% of the Irish group and if they make up 30% of the Castlerea prison population, we can see that is disproportionate to other groups of Irish citizens in prisons.