Charles Flanagan (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

I thank the office of the Ceann Comhairle for facilitating me in raising this matter and I thank the Minister of State for coming before the House to debate it.

This week, the Council of Europe's internationally respected Committee for the Prevention of Torture again shone a light on Ireland's prisons. The picture that emerged was deeply shocking. In short, Ireland's prisons are dominated by gangs, violence within them is mounting and they are flooded with illegal drugs.

While Ireland has been transformed into a modern, wealthy First World nation in the past decade, some of our prisons have remained in a Dickensian time warp. Such prisons are vastly overcrowded, with prisoners packed tightly into dank, stuffy and darkened cells; hundreds of inmates locked away for much of the day for their own protection; and basic sanitary facilities that are lacking.

The most modern feature of Irish prisons is the prevalence of narcotics. Mountjoy Prison was recently described as the biggest methadone clinic in the country. Prisoners on temporary release are placed under enormous pressure to smuggle drugs back into prison when they come back from outside. Drug treatment programmes are still optional. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of addiction will say that it is very difficult for an addict voluntarily to reach a decision to enter rehabilitation. Making such a decision optional when someone has just been incarcerated makes little sense. These people are in despair, feel they have nothing left to lose and have little appetite for the rigorous regime of drug rehabilitation. Who can blame them? Many of them have been failed completely by the State.

An analysis of 2,000 prisoners by the Institute of Criminology at University College Dublin has shown that incarcerated alongside the gang members that dominate prison life and making up the majority of prisoners are young, unemployed petty criminals. A total of 93% of the prisoners profiled by the institute were male; 82% of whom were unmarried with an average age just under 30. They do not have jobs and the majority of them do not have homes or do not feel they have a future. Shockingly, 65% of Irish prisoners are illiterate.

We expect this group of people voluntarily to sign up for drug rehabilitation programmes, literacy courses and so forth while all they want to do is concentrate on staying alive and unharmed in an environment where the threat of inter-prisoner violence is ever present and accessing drugs is as easy as accessing rehabilitation.

It is time that we got real about Irish prisons. Rehabilitation programmes for drug addicts should not be optional, rather they should be compulsory. A real and sustained effort must be made to encourage participation in education and training programmes in our prisons. The Victorian ideal that prisoners would reform inside prison through training programmes and education and make a contribution to society was a noble one, but that ideology appears to have been lost or at least replaced by a "lock them up and forget about them" approach.

Our current model evidently does not work. In the past ten years, the prison population has grown by more than 10,000. It costs the taxpayer €91,000 to keep one person imprisoned for a year and much more if the prisoner happens to be in Portlaoise Prison. That is not money well spent for two reasons. Rehabilitation is not taking place inside prisons and habitual criminality is rampant, with more than one quarter of people sentenced to jail going back there within a period of four years following their release.

The report of the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment has highlighted a prison system that is failing the prisoner, the prison officer and the tax-paying, law-abiding citizenry. We have now received the fourth report of the Council of Europe on Irish prisons. This must be the one that precipitates a meaningful policy shift by Government and transforms our prison system into a functioning, rehabilitative and corrective regime.

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