Ms Oonagh McPhillips:

I welcome the opportunity to meet the committee on the 2019 appropriation account for the Prisons Vote and chapter 7 of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s 2019 report, which deals with catering and ancillary services in prisons. I propose to keep my opening remarks brief and then hand over to the director general of the Prison Service, Ms McCaffrey.

The Prison Service is a key component of the criminal justice system and its voted expenditure is directed towards one strategic programme: provision of safe, secure, humane and rehabilitative custody for people sent to prison. The gross expenditure under the Vote in 2019 was €357.9 million, of which 71% related to payroll costs, 22% related to non-pay current expenditure and 7%, or €26.6 million, was capital related. The Prison Service operates 12 prisons. There were 8,939 committals to prisons, with a daily average of 3,971 prisoners in custody, during 2019. In total, there were 3,405 full-time equivalent staff in the Irish Prison Service, IPS, at the end of 2019.

The IPS is an executive office of the Department of Justice and operates within policy parameters established by the Minister as well as within statute, such as the prison rules. The Secretary General of the day is the Accounting Officer for the Vote and the director general and her team, including prison governors, manage the day-to-day operation of the 12 prisons around the country and the IPS's headquarters in Longford. The governance relationship between the Department and the IPS is underpinned by an oversight agreement between us in line with the code of practice for the governance of State bodies. The current agreement runs from 2020 to 2022, with provision for review and amendment annually as required. It sets out the respective roles and responsibilities of both parties, along with the key corporate governance compliance and reporting obligations of the IPS. It also provides for a minimum of four formal governance meetings per year, which are chaired by the assistant secretary with responsibility for governance of criminal justice bodies.

The difficulties of managing Covid-19 in institutional settings throughout the country have been particularly challenging. This has been accentuated in the high-risk, closed environment of our prisons. A significant amount of work has been carried out by the IPS to address this challenge. The measures taken have been informed and guided by the advice provided by the National Public Health Emergency Team, NPHET, and consistent with the prison-specific guidance for the management of Covid-19 issued by the WHO in March and the human rights guidance issued by the Council of Europe.

I acknowledge that, similar to other areas of Irish society, this has been a difficult and worrying time for prison staff, offenders and their families. Great efforts have been made to limit and curtail the spread of the virus in the prisons, including close co-operation with our health service colleagues on outbreak control and the establishment of a robust contact tracing model, which has been acknowledged by the WHO as best practice for prisons worldwide. I am proud of the work the IPS team has done and it and the prisoners themselves are to be commended on the manner in which the challenge of Covid-19 has been managed to date.

I will hand over to Ms McCaffrey.