Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Cathaoirleach. I was at a social welfare committee meeting before I came in here. That is why I was delayed.

Many issues have been covered. The key issue has just been touched on again, and that is why all these people are in prison and whether prison is something we inherited and just continue or whether it is actually delivering what it is meant to deliver. As far as I am concerned, there are reasons why one might take people out of society. One is for the safety of society. If, however, we are talking about prisoners going in for six or nine months, unless they came out totally different people, that does not achieve any result. If we are talking about rehabilitation, is prison the best model? I doubt it. Does it have the resources? I doubt it.

If I may move on specifically to women prisoners, a lot of the issues have been raised today, including children, pregnancy and so on.

However, it is also true to say that an awful lot of women prisoners are in for very short terms. Many of them are in because of addiction-related issues. As I have argued all along, should they not be sent to somewhere that would focus on rehabilitation and not incarcerated where the whole focus would be on maintaining links where there are good family links and building family links where they are not so good?

Judges have a role to play but they do not have the role to play. Policy has the role to play, in my view. Without spending years doing investigations and so on, we need to look at matters very simply. Most complicated issues can be broken into simple steps. Look at the cohort of female prisoners. Would they have been better served – which is the most important thing – had there been an alternative and, particularly in cases of addiction, where addiction services were provided in a supportive atmosphere, whether residential or day care? And would society ultimately be better served too? Because the good of the individual should also be the good of society if you are helping people to move on with their lives.

Have the witnesses any suggestions on the kind of work we can do on this issue? I think Ms Brady said there are 180 in the Dóchas Centre which has 140 places. That is at a stretch. It is a very small site and a high-wall facility. It is a big difference from home. I wonder how many of those women, it could be 110 or 120, pose no immediate threat to society. There will probably be a fair number in for shoplifting and things like that. They are not violent crimes but passive crimes.

Then on the men’s side, if we look at it numerically, men's prisons has the greatest overcrowding problem. There are just a lot more male prisoners. There is a high percentage of Travellers in the prison system but there seems to be a higher percentage in some prisons rather than others. In terms of Travellers in prison, because it seems that Galway people are sent there, I am most familiar with Castlerea. Have we statistics? We know recidivism is high. It is much higher for things like burglary and theft and for short sentences than long sentences. We also know that stable relationships and age reduce recidivism so when people get to their mid-40s it tends to drop. Are we doing enough to look at the causes of recidivism? What can we do between the time someone is apprehended for a crime until the time that person comes out of prison to try to make sure that the time they are out is not an interlude before they are back in again? How are we using the time? Should there be alternatives to prison, particularly in relation to addiction issues?

I understand that a very high number of prisoners have mental health issues. I know of prisoners who have been waiting for months to get referrals to whatever the new name is for the Central Mental Hospital - we will call it Portrane. That should not be happening. If people need medical care they should be getting medical care and not prison care. How good are the mental health supports in prison? These are the kinds of issues. For the reasons I have given, I do not think prison is delivering on the societal or the personal good. My big thing is how we can work together to avoid that.

That brings us back to two things. The mediation issue is massive. I am thinking of where there are feuds and disputes within communities. In the case of Galway, those disputes were going on for a long time and nothing was happening and action was taken when they moved down the town and then quick action was taken. It could have been nipped in the bud, in my view, a lot earlier. I think we have to question that. Is it that for as long as a situation is contained in certain communities, people just do not want to know and it is only when it spills into wider society that there is a big effort to deal with the issues? I am concerned about that too.

What I heard since I came in would be very useful, and I will not rehash that, but we do need to look at this through a very wide lens and provide better services for those who have to go into prison because there is no other alternative that anyone has created. Part of how we do that is to have fewer people in there and more people using alternatives.