Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

Deputy Ó Snodaigh is worried about a race to the bottom in the Irish Prison Service but I believe we are already there. We have a prison system which is rotten to the core. We have appalling levels of drug use which can only be explained by collusion between the inmates and the staff. We have rates of staffing which are three times the level in the UK, yet there seems to be no attempt to come to grips with the difficulties relating to extraordinary levels of overtime within the Irish prison system. We have tales of abuse, violence and savagery which would make one's hair stand on end. How can this happen with the levels of staffing in Irish prisons? Something is clearly rotten to the core. We have report after report, which are buried at the back of the Department's website, outlining a chronically dysfunctional system. We have Dickensian conditions in many, if not most, of our prisons.

I do not have any great ideological hang-up as to whether the State or the private sector would do a better job. The experience abroad is that if one brings in the private sector, it is really only motivated by profit. We should call a spade a spade and acknowledge that there are significant difficulties within a chronically dysfunctional prison system. Unless the Minister faces up to that, we will go nowhere.

This absurd idea of a super prison in the green fields of north Dublin will not solve the systemic problems of our prison service. We need to go much further much more quickly and ensure we work with the inmates in the prison system who have high rates of illiteracy, who no doubt have experienced high rates of abuse of all kinds, who come from the poorest areas and who have been deprived of education, training and many other services over the past few years because of this ideological face-off between the Minister and the prison officers.

We should point out where the difficulties lie. There are huge difficulties within the Irish Prison Service and we need radical reform of the management of prisons and the prison system itself. I worry this Bill will not address those kinds of issues.

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