Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform to the House. I also welcome the Bill. We debated the matter earlier in the year and I will not repeat what we covered on that occasion.

In 1993, on one of my first occasions to speak in the Seanad, I spoke on a prisons Bill. I asked rhetorically what was the purpose of prison. Reasons for prisons are punishment, to act as a deterrent, and to protect society from those who commit crime and rehabilitation.

Whatever our mixture of reasons for putting people in jail, if we are honest we must admit the prison service is bad at fulfilling any of these, even acting as a deterrent or keeping society safe. Meanwhile, it succeeds in far less attractive and desirable matters. Our prisons provide an excellent education and training system for the life of crime. Someone told me in Dublin we have four universities and asked me to name the fourth. He meant we had UCD, Trinity and DCU but that we also had the university of Mountjoy. He argued that of the four, Mountjoy had the most predictable results for its graduates.