Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that and I understand it is an internal report. We know a number of recommendations were made and it is key that we know how much progress has been made in implementing them.

Some of them relate to management within the prisons, how things work and certain issues that were raised in the past by whistleblowers, for want of a better word, within the system. They had issues with how the system was working and how the whole process was arranged. Moving forward, we need to ensure that the recommendations of this report are implemented in full so that we do not have any recurrence of that type of situation.

A key issue is the need to ensure that we have adequate trauma support and rehabilitative services for inmates in the Prison Service. We also need to ensure that we have the psychiatric support that is needed. As we know, and I discussed this with the Minister yesterday evening, it is actually more secure psychiatric spaces that we need rather than more prison spaces because we have a lot of people in prison who should not be there at all. One of the key parts of the service where there are recruitment difficulties is in the provision of psychiatric services and that needs to be examined.

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