Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

He did not do so.

In the course of a studio discussion, reference was made to questions put to me as Minister by the programme makers. Those questions were furnished to my Department only yesterday at 2.50 p.m., when I was visiting a child care facility in Cork before my visit to the National Ploughing Championships. It is self-evident that the film package on which the programme was based was already in the can. I remind the House that programme makers in RTE, and everybody else in that organisation, are bound to be impartial in their treatment of current affairs. Yesterday was a sorry departure from those standards which I intend to take up directly with the RTE Authority.

At no point during the year-long acquisition process for a replacement site for Mountjoy Prison was I ever offered any remotely suitable land at anything approximating to agricultural prices. Only a very naive person would think that I would have been offered land at those values in the context of the publicly advertised process embarked upon by my Department. Deputy McEntee may be interested to hear that some of the agriculturally zoned land in County Meath offered to my Department and rejected by the committee as unsuitable has since been disposed of for a price in the region of €175,000 per acre.

I am satisfied the Mountjoy II complex requires a site of this size in this location, and I am equally satisfied that no such site was available to me at any significant discount to the price paid. During my tenure as Minister, I have laid the basis for a radical transformation of the Irish Prison Service and its estate. In addition to the matters already referred to, I will shortly be bringing into effect a set of prison rules to replace the antiquated rules which now govern our prisons. I am pressing ahead with a new prison for the Munster region on Spike Island, the Thornton site for Mountjoy II, an expansion of Loughan House and Shelton Abbey as open prisons, the abolition of padded cells, which should be gone by the end of this year, and the reform of the Prison Service, ending the massive cannibalisation of capital projects every year through overtime. I got precious little support from the other side of the House. They told me that I was macho, posturing and aggressive. Yet I achieved what they have never achieved regarding those matters.

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