Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

It is all very well to say prisoners will have to earn remission and they will not get it unless they satisfy the governor and all the rest of it. Prison governors and prison officers would spend their lives in court arguing about the whys and the wherefores of cases. I do not wish to elaborate at too much length, I merely say it may sound good to say that at an Ard-Fheis but it would create mayhem in the prison system and in the courts. Judges would spend long hours listening to tales of woe from one prisoner or another as to what had happened in a particular case and whether the prison officer or the accused had started the row. I can only imagine the chaos. Prisoners would certainly be entitled to legal aid and the lawyers would have a field day. We might as well hand over the entire prison system to the Judiciary to run because it would become unmanageable. It may look good on an advertisement billboard on the side of a road in rural Ireland but it could not be done because of the legal costs, the implications of managing prisons, the paperwork, the assessment of every prisoner——

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