Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. This Bill raises some issues which might be surprising in one respect. The new facility in Portrane is almost finished or will be ready for commissioning very soon. It would be nonsense, therefore, not to provide for the relocation of the Central Mental Hospital to the site. I fully appreciate that point but I will make a couple of points.

This Bill is being introduced to this House now when the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum has effectively been prepared for closure and the arrangements for its reopening in Portrane have been advanced almost to completion. The issue that occurs to me is whether it is a wise strategy that is coming to an end. The Central Mental Hospital was established, as the Minister of State said, in the 19th century. I had the opportunity to visit it when I was Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform. I will come back to that later, if I may. The Central Mental Hospital has a number of functions, including the one in the Criminal Law (Insanity) Act 2006 to which the Minister of State referred. I was responsible for seeing that legislation through these Houses. One of the provisions of the Act was that prisoners who were suffering from psychiatric disorders and mental illness could be moved in certain circumstances from prisons to the Central Mental Hospital for inpatient treatment. That is the theory but the fact of it is quite different.Unfortunately, the Central Mental Hospital is not in a position to deal with the level of psychiatric illness in our prisons. It is by no means in a position to do that, and it is not philosophically oriented towards doing that. The hospital has been under the tutelage of Professor Kennedy for more than 21 years, and the tradition has been one of fairly small contact with the day-to-day psychiatric needs of prisoners. It does operate consultancy services within our prisons, but they are wholly inadequate to deal with the levels of mental illness in our prisons and they have been repeatedly criticised by the Irish Penal Reform Trust and the Council of Europe's Committee on the Prevention of Torture.

When I became Minister for justice in 2002, one of the first things I did that summer was to visit Mountjoy Prison, and one of the first things I saw there was a padded cell. I will now describe the cell for those in the House. It was about the size of a horse stall. Its walls and floor had brown rubber mats on them, there was a pink light hanging from around eight feet above, shining down, and there was no daylight in the cell whatsoever. The only supervisory access to it was through a peephole in the door. I asked to see the cell because I was aware of the condemnation of the Irish padded cell situation that existed at the time. When the door was opened, I discovered a prisoner in his underpants with a blanket or towel lying on the floor in the foetal position with a plastic potty beside him, in almost complete darkness. I was so horrified and taken aback by what I saw that day, that I immediately told the Irish Prison Service that the situation had to change and we could stand over it no longer. With the Government's backing, in December of that year, we announced plans to scrap padded cells and replace them with facilities for at-risk prisoners called observation cells, with much more daylight and windows in them.

That was the beginning of my hands-on experience of how prisoners with psychiatric and mental health problems were dealt with in the Irish Prison Service. To say that that was the beginning of a history of involvement is an understatement. As Minister, I had almost constant interaction with the Committee on the Prevention of Torture, the Irish Penal Reform Trust and similar organisations on the problems that arose. I had almost constant involvement with these organisations and with other people - and I hope to come back to this later in the debate on this Bill - right up to the point where a prisoner, Gary Douche, ended up being murdered in a basement collective cell block with 13 other prisoners, in circumstances, again, where a prisoner who was mentally ill, was afforded access to him. I want to set that scene for Members because there are other remarks that I would like to make on this Bill and the approach of the Irish State to the treatment of mentally ill prisoners, and prisoners suffering from psychiatric disorders, which I think needs a radically different approach from that set out in this Bill, as good as the progress reflected in this Bill actually is.