Mr. Fergal Black:

That is possible but my experience of women who eventually find their way into custody is that there is an accumulation of charges before a judge will eventually place them in custody. Unfortunately, women who come into custody are suffering multiple difficulties. If a woman has a partner in custody, invariably she will visit and send money to that partner. The partner knows that the children are being looked after by his or her wife or partner. When a woman comes into custody, invariably there are difficulties where she has a whole complexity of issues in terms of mental health, addiction and psychological care. Her children could face being taken into care. The women go to our hairdressers when they have a physical visit and, on occasion, they go down and nobody turns up to see them.

Women who come into custody have a complexity of issues. The very positive information from this year's budget Estimates process is that we finally got, for the first time, funding to employ directly not just general nurses but psychiatric nurses. We got a considerable injection of funding to recruit psychologists to work on mental health. All those measures will be very positive in the context of providing better care for people sent to our custody.