Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is utterly wrong and unjustifiable that this directive was passed in Europe on 5 December 2011 and we are here now, in 2021, ten years later, having been prodded by the European Commission by way of referring Ireland to a European court for not implementing this directive. I cannot understand the reason for or the logic of our representatives going over to the European Union agreeing directives if they have no intention of implementing them. Maybe we agree to too many directives but if one agrees, one should then follow the letter of the law. I am particular hard where the State does not follow the law. We expect citizens to follow the law. We bring them to court for not following the law. It is totally unjustifiable when the State does not comply with its legal obligations. I have seen and heard no justification.

We know there was previous legislation, and I will come to that in more detail.

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We also know that, due to various court cases and so on, very few people will be transferred.

It is important to note that 1,100 Irish people are imprisoned abroad in 30 countries. However, one country dominates above all, and that is our nearest neighbour, the UK. After all the years waiting for the Bill to be published, it does not cover the UK, which is no longer a member of the EU. I understand that a commitment has been made to introduce amendments on Committee Stage, but I find that practice unacceptable. There were ten years to get this right and three years to deal with the Brexit issue. In the 26 years since the 1995 legislation, 459 applications of a total of 563 came from prisoners in the UK. There must be a cast-iron guarantee that we will see those amendments on Committee Stage rather than Report Stage.

The Minister of State might clarify another matter. Since Northern Ireland is jurisdictionally part of the UK, will people serving sentences in the North be able to apply for transfer to serve their sentences in the South? I know a number of Irish citizens who are desirous of doing so. Will the provisions apply to all Irish citizens irrespective of where they are from on the island?

I have heard much about prisoners. There are various types of prisoner. The more one visits prisons, the more one sees that prisoners are as varied as society. There are large drug barons with multinational operations, but if one carried out a census of the prison population, one would find that they only constituted a small minority. There are people in prison for all sorts of reason. Some prisoners are there for doing something wrong that caused a conviction but for whom reoffending is unlikely. One thing I am certain of is that all prisoners have human rights and are entitled to good prison treatment. The better the system, the better the treatment. The better the supports in prison, the more likely it is that, when people come out, they will reintegrate into society peacefully. The rationale for this legislation is humanitarianism and rehabilitation.

Something that always strikes me when dealing with prisoners is the significant burden put on families - parents, partners, spouses and children. I see this all the time. It is edifying to see the considerable effort that families make, many of whom must travel long distances to make visits, some of which can be short. Never forget that, when someone is sentenced to prison, it has a significant effect on family members in virtually all cases. In a strange way, we are relying on them more than on the prison system. Even people involved in the prison system have told me that people who are in stable relationships are much less likely to reoffend than those who are not. Therefore, we rely considerably on family members as part of the rehabilitative process. If people are serving prison sentences abroad, we can imagine the costs and burdens placed on their family members, who have committed no crime and are guilty of nothing, in trying to visit them.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, all things being equal, persons who serve their sentences in their home countries can be rehabilitated, resocialised and reintegrated into their communities better than elsewhere. The objective evidence is that giving people this option is a good idea.

I understand that the Bill contains a new principle that is part of the directive, that being people can be sent home against their will. I favoured the old arrangement where someone could not be transferred against his or her will. This is a matter that I will follow up during later Stages.

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