Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I mentioned an industrial relations issue that has been ironed out. I gave the list of the preventative issues that are taking place. In fairness, 500 of this country's 3,000 prisoners are on methadone treatment. They are being tested. One cannot move to any of the open-end prisons without having been tested and found to be drug free. Substantial moves are being made in that area.

We also need to focus on the security area, which is the other side of it, as part of the carrot and stick approach. We are providing for mandatory drug testing and studying trends of drug misuse. Prisons are using dogs to do searches on a daily basis. More than 30 people are directly involved in that in our prisons. Prisons are using security screens like those used in airports to check if people coming in and out are carrying drugs. Let us be honest, many of those who visit prisoners use imaginative and hard to detect ways of carrying drugs in and out of prisons. The only way to counteract such behaviour is to use sophisticated technology. Prisons are taking many other measures in respect of staffing and visitors etc. We would have said a few years ago that such methods were not needed in prisons. That is one side of it. The other side is to try to help prisoners to break the habit by giving them a chance to do so while they are in prison. They should be able to avail of the advice of those who can assist them, such as addiction counsellors and consultant psychiatrists. We can use heavy-handed security measures on those who choose not to look for help. Both of those approaches are in operation. I am not saying there is no difficulty. A section of the prison population and a section of those who visit prisoners go to extraordinary lengths to bring drugs into our prisons.

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