Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I did not find any members of the British Army there. It felt surreal to discuss the nature of the Voluntary Health Insurance, VHI, system with a person serving the fifth year of a 40-year sentence for the murder of a garda. The experience lived with me.

I can understand the occasional, headline grabbing statement on the luxury of living in prison but anyone who makes such comments has even less experience of the prison system than I do. The prospect that such enclosure will be one's life for six months, not to mention 40 years, is quite overwhelming.