Charles Flanagan (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

I move amendment No. 1:

In the first paragraph after "in the County of Fingal" to insert the following:

"—that, to ensure the safety of prisoners and staff or the Irish Prison Service, there is an urgent need to improve the quality of certain prison accommodation in Ireland;

that, recognising the existence of a new women's prison, Dóchas, the need for women to be held in a completely separate facility from men and held within easy access of visiting families and children to ensure community and generational continuity and support, women shall not be held in the facility at Thornton Hall;

that the facility at Thornton Hall will never be used to house persons under 18 years of age;

that the facility at Thornton Hall will never be used to house persons seeking asylum or protection from persecution;

that no part of the facility at Thornton Hall shall constitute an 'approved centre' for involuntary admission of persons suffering from a disorder under the Mental Health Act 2001;

that the facility at Thornton Hall have visiting hours at weekends and in the evening of specified weekdays so as to allow maximum opportunity for visitation by families to persons detained at the facility at Thornton Hall;

that the facility at Thornton Hall shall be serviced by a frequent and low-cost public transport service at all visiting times which must service the transport hub of Busáras and Connolly Station;

that prison policy in Ireland be informed by a rehabilitative agenda which incorporates education, training, psychological assistance and drug detoxification as its core principles;

that every prisoner at the facility at Thornton Hall shall have an Integrated Sentence Management programme designed for him, with particular emphasis placed on reintegration into the community at the end of their sentence to include provision of short term accommodation;

that every prisoner at the facility at Thornton Hall have access to comprehensive education and vocational training, with particular emphasis on literacy development for any prisoner; and

that every prisoner at the facility at Thornton Hall who suffers from a drug addiction have access to a comprehensive drug detoxification programme.".

We are debating an important motion on the proposed new prison complex at Thornton Hall in north county Dublin, but the debate we should have at this stage is one about the future direction of our prisons system. We should ask ourselves a number of questions, not least of which is whether the current system is functioning effectively and whether it represents value for money for the taxpayer. Are Irish prisons successfully rehabilitating criminals or are inmates coming out with the same problems and attitudes they possessed when initially sentenced? The evidence, as derived from numerous reports, including those of the prison inspectorate, prison chaplains and the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture, CPT, is that our prison system is utterly dysfunctional.

The CPT's report into Irish prisons, published in October 2007, described a scenario where inter-prisoner violence was rife, fuelled by the widespread availability of illegal drugs and the existence of a gang culture. Three prisons were singled out as being particularly dangerous in this context, Limerick, Mountjoy and St. Patrick's Institution. The fact that the latter is a facility for young people makes this finding all the more shocking. Figures published last October indicated that more than 770 prisoners were under protective custody for their own safety in prisons nationwide, out of a total prison population of fewer than 3,500. In the meantime, in 2007 an average of one prisoner per month died while in custody as a result of drug overdoses, murder or natural causes.

Our prisons are seriously overcrowded. Why is this the case? Part of the answer is that the Government has failed to progress measures, such as the Fines Bill — recently on the Order Paper — which aims to prevent people from being routinely imprisoned for defaulting on fines. We have not yet had the opportunity to debate the Fines Bill, much less enact it.

In Ireland being imprisoned is no obstacle to continuing to run a drugs empire from within. It may be somewhat inconvenient, but mobile phones help gang members and leaders to carry on their business almost as normal. A number of mobile phones have been seized in prison searches, but the Government has yet to commit to the installation of mobile phone inhibitors across all our prisons. I would like the Minister to explain what is holding him back from taking this urgent and important step.

The drip feed of information into the public arena in respect of what prison searches have uncovered has confused the taxpayer somewhat. After all, it is the taxpayer that foots the bill for Irish prisons. A year ago, a prison search in my local prison in Portlaoise uncovered an array of objects that included 17 phones, drugs, syringes, home-made alcohol, plasma TV sets, DVD players and two budgies. With regard to the plasma TVs, a spokesman for the Irish Prison Service stated: "Electrical goods that were bought by the prisoners were allowed in [but] it was felt that type of concession shouldn't have been allowed to the extent that it was." These events conjure up the image of an incoherent prison policy where it is not clear what rights and privileges inmates should or should not be permitted to enjoy.

Far more serious than the availability of plasma TVs in our prisons is the widespread availability of drugs. In their most recent annual report the prison chaplains state: "The misuse of drugs continues to be a major problem in most of our prisons. Many people will in fact have been introduced to drugs initially while they were in prison." It is a shocking indictment on our prison system that people who enter the prison system without a drug problem can acquire one during the time they are in prison.

The chaplains further point to the fact that drug offences are the reason many are incarcerated in the first instance. In this context, the limited and ad hoc availability of drug treatment programmes within prisons is nothing short of a national disgrace. Currently, only nine prisoners at a time can avail of the special six-week addiction treatment programme in Mountjoy. Prisoners seeking drug-free landings to help combat their addictions are denied the facility due to chronic overcrowding. Mountjoy, with a capacity of 920 to 930, currently has between 980 and 990 prisoners.

The Minister had the gall to inform this House last month: "With regard to demand elimination and treatment for prisoners with drug problems, the policy and strategy provides for a comprehensive range of treatment options." The pathetic reality is that our prison drugs policy is and has been an abject failure. The Government is not just failing the prisoner, it is failing society. A prison system that takes a non-addict in off the streets and returns a drug addict to the same streets is, simply, shameful. One could argue that in our prison system the chickens have come home to roost.

The Government's failure to comprehensively tackle the importation of drugs into the State provides some of the inmates with career opportunities and entraps more of the inmates into a spiral of crime and addiction. We currently have one X-ray scanner to cover all of our ports and one patrol vessel to guard our entire coastline, with one more of each promised. I would like to know what type of cost-benefit analysis, if any, informed the decision not to provide a scanner for every port, given the impressive success rate of the lone scanner to date.

The consequences of the failure to invest adequately in our education system or to tackle educational disadvantage and truancy through comprehensive programmes are visible inside our prisons, where 50% of young offenders in St. Patrick's Institution are illiterate, rising to 65% for the adult prisoner population. These figures starkly illustrate the link between educational disadvantage and crime.

Does our prison system address these factors? Does it provide a comprehensive literacy, education and training programme for prisoners? The answer, unsurprisingly, is "no". Programmes are ad hoc and likely to be cut short or abolished at the whim of the appropriate Minister. Programmes such as the CONNET project disappear without a trace. Integrated sentence management is still available, but only to the few. The probation service is scandalously under-resourced, with provision likely to be further squeezed as our economy goes into decline. As the Minister opposite me said, "There is not a red cent in the coffers".

In his last report before his death, the Inspector of Prisons and Places of Detention, Mr. Justice Kinlen, stated that the Irish prison system was dysfunctional and lacking in educational, psychiatric and rehabilitation services. This is a damning indictment by a man who had spent several years closely examining prisons across the State.

This leads to the question of the net result of all this dysfunction. The answer is provided by the shocking rate of recidivism. The latest figures show that 50% of prisoners re-offend within four years of their release, while 27% find themselves back behind bars within a year. The duty of Government is to protect and uphold the common good. It is failing spectacularly to do so in respect of its approach to prisons. Criminals are taken off the streets for a short period of time, but this time is too short in many cases, particularly in respect of an Irish life sentence, which equates to 13 years. Offenders are released back into society without rehabilitation, leading to a staggeringly large proportion of them reoffending and being re-incarcerated within a short period. This is not an issue of public safety alone, although clearly public safety is the key issue.

In an era when the Government is happy to close hospital beds and take teachers away from schools, the taxpayers of Ireland are spending almost €100,000 per prisoner per annum to maintain a revolving door prison system. Is this value for money? Is it fair to the taxpayer? A defining feature of successive Fianna Fáil Governments is the willingness to spend other people's money without a second thought. Ministers frequently boast about spending "their money" as if the Exchequer was a personal account, rather than taxpayers' money to be used for the purposes of careful investment in crucial services.

This disregard for prudent spending is abundantly obvious in regard to the purchase of land at Thornton Hall. The Comptroller and Auditor General found that the site purchased at Thornton Hall was 50% bigger than the size of the site originally sought; the Department did not seek professional advice on the potential impact that advertising its interest in acquiring land would have on the price that it would likely have to pay; the OPW failed to adhere to the rules in regard to procurement of professional services; the Department failed to consider cost per acre in its evaluation process; and, the State twice ended up negotiating a sale with a single vendor with no effective degree of competition, thereby weakening hand of the State as a negotiator. Most damming of all, the State failed to secure value for money, paying way above the market value of agricultural land in the area at a cost of €200,000 per acre, leaving the taxpayer with a total bill of €40 million.

The Thornton Hall project has been characterised by ineptitude from its earliest days. The idea of a new, modern prison which could address the manifold shortcomings of existing prisons is a sound one, but, as usual, the Government has taken a good idea and sought to replace the positive aspects with a host of negatives.

The Minister plans to demolish Dóchas, the women's prison, considered one of the few modern and effective prisons in the State, notwithstanding the need for more space. Dóchas was built ten years ago at a cost of €30 million, but now the Minister proposes to demolish it and relocate to Thornton Hall. He proposes to accommodate young offenders at Thornton Hall, a breach of international law and human rights. He promises this will be a temporary measure, yet how can anybody trust this promise? He proposes to criminalise the mentally ill by moving the Central Mental Hospital to Thornton Hall. This is despite the likely brain-drain that such a move would precipitate given the reluctance of expert staff to relocate and the assessment by independent economists that it would be more effective to redevelop the Dundrum campus.

The Government proposes to detain asylum seekers at Thornton Hall in direct opposition to international best practice. If ever a Government was capable of turning a potential positive into a resounding negative it is this one.

Fine Gael believes it is not acceptable to turn Thornton Hall into a super-sized crime academy where prisoners are locked away with no effort made to persuade them away from a life of crime. Instead Thornton Hall must be part of a new approach to prisoners characterised by a focus on rehabilitating serious criminals. The new prison must not become somewhere where current dysfunctional trends are permitted to magnify. Fine Gael proposes every prisoner has access to vocational training, psychological assistance, drug detoxification programmes and education. They must also have a dedicated management programme to re-integrate them into the community.

Thornton Hall should focus on the most serious offenders — the murderers, gangland criminals, rapists and violent burglars. The last any reasonable person wants is for expensive prison spaces to be taken up by minor offenders or debt defaulters who should not be in prison at all. I am calling on the Minister to reject plans to place women, juvenile offenders, asylum seekers or those with mental health problems at Thornton Hall. They have no place in a facility designed for serious offenders.

Thornton Hall presents the Government with an opportunity to critically evaluate its prison policy. Years of turning a deaf ear to the reports of the Inspector of Prisons and Places of Detention, the prison chaplains and the Council of Europe has compounded failures. It is time the Government faced up to its mistakes and set about comprehensively addressing them. It is important the Government does not allow an opportunity pass to address a prison policy that has so long been characterised by failure. The Minister owes it to the people to deliver an effective and rehabilitative prison programme.

It has been some time since we have had a debate on prison policy in the House. I hope the Minister will take on board the sound proposals in amendment No. 1 to the motion. There will also be an opportunity at the justice committee to hear the Minister's proposals and the local community's concerns. The Minister will have an opportunity to deal with the various recommendations from domestic and international reports on our prison system.

Prison must be a place where serious offenders are detained and their liberty removed. It must provide an opportunity to treat, educate and rehabilitate in accordance with human rights concerns and international best practice.

See this speech in context