Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I am sure the Minister knows that, some 20 years ago, the Committee of Inquiry into the Penal System, headed by Dr. T. K. Whitaker, produced the landmark report on the Irish prison system. When I referred to it earlier today, the Minister uttered a rather belittling reply. I remind him that Dr. Whitaker, who is alive and well — I am not sure if the Minister knows this — wrote this year the foreword to "The Whitaker Committee Report 20 Years On: Lessons Learned or Lessons Forgotten?" Dr. Whitaker is the doyen of Irish public servants and is in many ways the father of our economic prosperity and growth. He is also a man with unbelievable humanity capable of reaching out not only to people who are poor but to those on the wrong side of the law, often as a consequence of their poverty. He does not regard their poverty as an excuse for their being on the wrong side of the law.

In his foreword, Dr. Whitaker states: "We recommended a limit on prison places as a spur to the introduction of more relevant and less costly forms of legal redress and punishment." As the Minister stated recently, there is not a red cent for the hospital in Navan. He will blow the house on this super-prison proposal for 2,200 inmates.

Dr. T. K. Whitaker stated:

. . . what I have gained from all this is a greater appreciation of the difficulties of dealing humanely and effectively with those [people who end up in prison]. It is disappointing, in this context, that the Dóchas centre for women prisoners faces closure and removal to a less convenient location.

That is a senior civil servant who used soft words to make an appeal to his successors in the public service to have some sense.

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