Dominic Hannigan (Labour)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House.I am pleased to speak on this motion, because the prison is just outside Ashbourne, County Meath, and I have been aware of the problems and complexities of this issue for some time. Three years ago I was attending meetings of 400 and 500 people voicing their concerns. Many questions still need to be answered and it is to be hoped that having the Minister of State present will mean some of them will be addressed today. This will probably be the most expensive prison facility ever built on this island so it is important we get it right.

I am still perplexed as to why the Government had to pay so much for the land. It was a mistake and the Government has tried to put as many buildings on to the land as possible to try to recoup its investment. That is a mistake. It is not a suitable site for a women's prison and neither should the Central Mental Hospital be relocated there.

However, we need to move away from the issue of how much it cost and how great a mistake was made and focus on other matters. I shall shortly come to the issue of the size of the main prison, but first I shall talk briefly about proposals to relocate the women's prison and the Central Mental Hospital to Thornton Hall. I cannot see what benefits will be achieved by relocating the female prison to an overwhelmingly male dominated environment. Instead, we should be re-examining the question of refurbishing the Dóchas centre at Mountjoy. It is a safer and more preferable option and ultimately more cost beneficial.

I am concerned about the proposal to move the Central Mental Hospital from its current home at Dundrum and organisations close to this issue, such as Schizophrenia Ireland, have seriously questioned whether this is a good idea. We will all have seen the report by Mr. Jim Power, chief economist with Friends First, who suggests that the sale of just 14 acres of the land at Dundrum would raise about €140 million. That figure might be somewhat lower in the current market, but his point is that we could sell some of the site and build a completely new hospital at Dundrum. It would mean that users would have access to the best facilities possible. His report, Patients Not Prisoners, makes that point, as does The Irish Times. Interestingly, the point was made in The Irish Times yesterday that 100 years ago when the Central Mental Hospital was being built at Dundrum, it was decided not to build it adjoining a prison institution as this would not be the right message because of the potential stigma. I ask the Minister of State to look again at this issue, and I am glad that some Members on the Government side of the House are admitting that perhaps this is not the thing to do.

Neither do I believe that the case has sufficiently been made for a prison of this size. My Dáil colleague, Deputy Pat Rabbitte, has made the point that at the moment Mountjoy holds about 900 prisoners. This proposal is for a prison that would cater for up to 2,200. I shall quote from a couple of pieces of research as regards prison size and I hope Members bear with me as I read these findings into the record. A recent report by the Scottish prison service says:

The effective management of a large prison population requires that prisoner groupings continually need to be broken up and dispersed as the most viable antidote for dealing with order problems. A small number of very large prisons creates difficulties in splitting up prisoner groupings, such that there are no points of contact . . . Effective separation requires a reasonable number of moderately sized prisons to achieve this — again, this would be achievable with establishments at or around 700.

Security concerns were raised about prison size by Lord Woolf's report into the Strangeways riots in 1990 which many of us will remember. That report recommended a maximum size of just 400, significantly lower than the Thornton Hall proposal. The UK's chief inspector of prisons, Ms Anne Owers, has also commented on the issue of prison size. She warns in her most recent annual report against the UK Government proposals for a vast expansion in so-called Titan prisons containing about 2,500 prisoners. Such establishments fly in the face of experience to the effect that smaller prisons work better, Ms Owers says. The larger prisons may be more efficient, she argues, but at the cost of being less effective. These are two cases from across the water which cast serious doubt on these so-called super-prisons.

At the same time I am aware that super-prisons exist elsewhere. The Rikers Island prison complex in New York, for example, has 17,000 inmates. It consists of ten penal institutions for young offenders, male and female, all split up separately and contained in different parts of the complex. It has been operating successfully since 1985. Singapore, too, has started to implement its Changi prison complex which could eventually house more than 20,000 prisoners in 20 different penal institutions on the one site. The operators in Singapore say the infrastructure, design and technology would enable economies of scale and allow enhanced security and better rehabilitation for prisoners. I am fully prepared to accept, therefore, that there is a debate about what the optimal size of a prison should be. I do not know the answer but I want to hear a clear rationale for why 2,200 is the right size for us. People deserve to know this and I also want to know how the prison will be segmented, clustered and operated.

I have further detailed issues with the operation of the prison that need to be sorted out, probably before the design stage. For instance, it must be accessible to visitors, staff and gardaí. The Minister of State's colleague in Government, Deputy Trevor Sargent will be very aware of the road system in that part of the world. He would concede that an essential road system is needed before this prison opens, as is a bus service, which does not exist around Thornton Hall at the moment. Deputy Sargent might cycle there but the majority of visitors will come by public transport or car, so we need to put these facilities in place before the prison opens.

Senator O'Toole asked me to raise the issue of boundary treatment and landscaping. We are proposing a 7 m high wall. Given the space available, this could be moved back to create a larger boundary between the prison and the adjoining residential population. These are detailed issues that I fully accept can be worked out. We need to allocate the space on the site appropriately and it is to be hoped that if the Minister of State takes on board the points about the Central Mental Hospital and the women's prison, there will be more space available. This space should be used for rehabilitative purposes. I would like to see more sports grounds on the site, more study areas, classrooms and decent sized accommodation for inmates. Those matters can be looked at and I hope the Minister of State can take them on board.

I do not believe the proposal as it stands is the answer to the problems of the Irish Prisons Service. I do not believe that locating the Central Mental Hospital or the women's prison there is a good idea. The debate is over as to whether the Government was right to buy such a large amount of land there. Let us use it for rehabilitative purposes to ensure prisoners have as much land as they need.