Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 26 September 2024

Committee on Key Issues affecting the Traveller Community

Travellers in Prison: Discussion

10:30 am

Photo of Éamon Ó CuívÉamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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As an aside, during the 1990s, I used to visit republican prisoners in prisons in England. I would often engage with the governors about things outside of the immediate issue I was there for. They told me that longer sentences were not producing better results and there were more people in prison. They had the exact same syndrome going on with more people in prison and longer sentences. The prison authorities themselves, that is, the governors, saw that it was not working. We seem to have got into this vortex here at the moment that more prison spaces are the answer, rather than analysing all the people who are in prison and asking why they are there.

The Dóchas Centre has been identified as the most overcrowded. The issue there is probably the easiest to solve as well and would have the least resistance from the public if it were solved.