Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I was very grateful to them for that support because it was suggested in some sense that this was wasteful, but it was not.

I wish to make a further point while we are dealing with the issue of Thornton Hall because Part 4 of this legislation will apply to it. There is no tract of 150 acres 14 kms from O'Connell Street which was available for any lesser price. People can cod themselves and talk about agricultural prices and the price of farms in counties Meath or Louth or elsewhere, but nobody would sell such a large tract of land to the State that distance from O'Connell Street for less than €200,000 an acre. Nobody has ever pointed to a single transaction either around that time or since that time when a similar tract of land that close to the city centre was sold for a lesser price. I want to put that on the record.

I want above all to say that the view of the Accounting Officer and Secretary General of my Department, Mr. Seán Aylward, that this process should be done openly and fairly through public advertisement was strongly supported by the members of the Committee of Public Accounts of Dáil Éireann. I am glad that happened because it was vindication for high and decent standards in public accounting and public responsibility.

In regard to the broader philosophical questions that have arisen in this debate about whether prison is or is not of any use. I listened to Senators Norris, Ryan, Ó Murchú and others who have differing points of view on this issue. My view is that prison is a necessary adjunct of a democratic liberal society. In an ideal world none of us would want to see anybody go to prison. I have consistently enunciated the view that going to prison is usually a personal disaster for the person involved and it is usually, even in the minds of the most strict of judges, the course of last resort. However, there are crimes, as has been pointed out here, which must be punished. It is not fashionable to say any more, even though it is true, that if crime went unpunished, it would be the end of civilisation as we know it. The public need to see the wrongdoer punished, although not in some kind of vindictive or retributive way alone. An element of punishment must be included and, on this side of the Atlantic at any rate, an element of rehabilitation. We must have light at the end of the tunnel and a sense of redemption in almost every case possible.

We do not go for the notion of "three strikes and you are out". I recently heard on BBC Radio 4 that a 16 year old in Colorado could be sentenced to life without parole for murder. That is not the European perspective on criminality and punishment. I do not want to criticise the United States. However, the US political culture has a stronger emphasis on retribution than the European culture. In this regard, Ireland is closer to Berlin than Boston.

Consider the fact we have approximately 3,500 prisoners, which means less than one person in 1,000 is serving a custodial sentence. Compare that to states in the US where three or four people, mainly black and poor, in 100 are in prison. We have different emphases and outcomes. Whatever view we have on what to do about crime, let us remember we must always approach it exactly on the basis Senator ÓMurchú pointed out, which is how one treats criminals is an indication of the type of society in which one lives.

I invite every Member of both Houses who has not seen Mountjoy Prison to make arrangements to do so. One does not need to be soft-hearted to walk around the prison and come to the clear conclusion that one could not be proud of it and it must be finished. I do not claim moral superiority for championing the end of Mountjoy Prison. Anybody who walked around it, particularly someone with ministerial responsibility, and considered people deserved those conditions would have great difficulty looking at himself or herself in a mirror. My view is that Mountjoy Prison must be closed.

The same applies to St. Patrick's Institution. I agree with what Senator Tuffy stated. Even with the additional educational facilities and workshops opened recently, it is not the right place for young people. It is not a decent environment in which to deal with criminality.

Senator Norris spoke about the Central Mental Hospital and that the Minister of State, Deputy Tim O'Malley, stated in an ideal world one would locate a forensic psychiatric institution distant from a prison. The great majority of customers of the Central Mental Hospital are involved with the criminal justice system in one way or another. The situation at present is not merely far from satisfactory, it is bordering on the indefensible. I had to deal with the United Nations and the Council of Europe on the approach of the Irish State to mental illness in prisons. It is a difficult pitch to defend in any way what happens here at present.

The Central Mental Hospital is not physically located or orientated towards its main customer base. We must remember a considerable number of people sent to prison for serious crimes either suffer from a psychiatric illness of one type or another short of criminal insanity or manifest such psychiatric conditions frequently. Anybody who went to Mountjoy Prison and saw as I did on my first trip a man in his thirties or forties crouched in a darkened padded cell resembling an oversized darkened phone box, lying on the floor in his underpants with a pot beside him, a little mattress and a slightly pink lamp above him could not rightly think the regime was anything other than grossly inhumane. As a result of that we accelerated the provision of observation cells and decent facilities for people undergoing psychiatric crises, even in prisons we intend to demolish.

A person in prison who is psychiatrically ill should be removed to a psychiatric hospital as quickly as possible and dealt with there. We cannot have the present situation whereby because of physical and intellectual distance between the Prison Service and the psychiatric facility designed to serve it people remain in inhumane circumstances and are not given the type of psychiatric care to which they are entitled.

These issues are real and not imaginary. I still await the report of Michael Mellett, a former deputy secretary of my Department, into the death of Gary Douch. The circumstances in which a prisoner was released into Mountjoy Prison having been committed to the Central Mental Hospital some days prior still await satisfactory explanation.

I do not want to speak for too long and trespass on the patience of the House. However, I want the House to know that Thornton Hall and the new Munster prison will allow a different approach to the question of drugs in our prisons. I do not agree with the proposition that because drugs are outside the walls of prisons we must accept they will be inside the walls of prisons, anymore than one could state because drugs are outside the walls of schools or discos they are inside the walls of schools or discos.

As a society we have an obligation to ensure our prisons are rehabilitative and not places where people amass further debts to drug lords and have their lives run by drugs, their personal safety ruled by drugs and die of self-administered overdoses. That is not acceptable in any circumstance. The fact drugs are outside prisons does not justify tolerating drugs inside prison.