Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome those comments. It would be very useful if we could get a timeline for that consideration and a schedule of when those audits will take place. As the Minister of State is well aware, people with disabilities are over-represented at all stages of the criminal justice system. He spoke about the accessibility of prison facilities in terms of capital investment but there is an overlap or grey area between a number of issues here. He rightly picked out the Irish Penal Reform Trust, which did a very good report in 2020 looking at this issue. It cited a lack of access to aids, things like white canes and technical aids, and a lack of access to plain language and guides. Some people do not have the wherewithal or ability to communicate that they might need extra provision. They cannot always tell those in authority that they need those aids. In one case, a person who is deaf had access to only one hour of sign language a week, which would obviously be in breach of our new ISL legislation from 2017. A number of those recommendations included a human-rights based disability assessment of existing infrastructure. That would be timely.

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