Ivana Bacik (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for her response on Second Stage, particularly to my question about the relocation of the Central Mental Hospital, albeit that the first half of 2021 is still unclear. From what she said - and I appreciate she is just being realistic - it seems it could be as late of June of next year. Given the urgency with which this Bill is being taken through, to which we do not object, it seems unfortunate that it will take so long to have the relocation carried out. Senator McDowell's amendment specifies a nearer date, which would be welcome.

The Senator raised a number of important points about prison conditions more generally. Like him, I pay tribute to Grainne McMorrow on her report into the dreadful murder of Gary Douch and what it showed us about the appalling conditions in Mountjoy Prison at the time, including the overcrowding and the lack of facilities for people with mental and psychiatric illness in the prison.

Without rehashing that debate there were a number of problems with the Thornton Hall project as originally envisaged. At the time, the Irish Penal Reform Trust raised concerns about the scale of that prison development. Some 2,200 places were proposed and it was being described as a supermax prison or an Irish equivalent of that. There was a lot of concern about cost and there was concern about the proposed location of the Central Mental Hospital on the same campus. I am conscious that, as Senator Boyhan rightly said, the hospital is a hospital and not a prison. The Portrane site is infinitely preferable because it is a hospital site, which is important. It is hard to believe that the McGuinness report to which Senator McDowell referred was back in 2011.It is a long time ago. Her report said the site at Thornton Hall should be built upon for a new prison but at a dramatically scaled-down size. That expert group did not agree with the 2,200 proposal and, indeed, I believe its proposal was for a much smaller prison built along more therapeutic and rehabilitative lines to house no more than 500 people in one facility and 200 in another. It is extraordinary that nine years after that report, we still do not have any facility there. I would agree; I was a regular visitor to Mountjoy Prison over many years and saw first-hand the improvements that were carried out on site. It is still, however, a prison that dates back to 1850 in which the cells are woefully inadequate for modern conditions.

To return to the matter of relocation, which is the subject of this welcome Bill, the point about capacity we spoke about earlier ties in with the timeframe in this amendment. While we have all acknowledged that the increase to 170 places is welcome, we have also acknowledged that it is not enough. Like many of my fellow members of a previous Oireachtas justice committee, I believe we should be reducing the numbers in our prisons and relying more on community-based sanctions, particularly for non-violent minor offences. At the same time, we need to see an increase in forensic beds and psychiatric places to enable us to deal with the waiting list which I have described and to which Professor Harry Kennedy and the director general of the Irish Prison Service have referred. At any one time, 20 to 30 persons per week are waiting to get admission to the Central Mental Hospital.

I want to refer to one key issue. There has been an increase in the number of people seeking treatment, but there has also been an increase in the amount of time people spend in detention in the Central Mental Hospital. Clearly, that is a huge factor to be built into the timeframe for relocation. Looking at the figures, much of this is to do with an increase in verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity. Professor Kennedy told the justice committee that ten years ago, two persons per annum might have been brought into the Central Mental Hospital by virtue of one of those verdicts, but it is now up to approximately ten per annum. He said that the average stay is approximately seven years for somebody who has been found not guilty by reason of insanity. That has increased the average stay of a person in the CMH currently to 4.4 years from 2.1 years on average in 2008. He is quoted as saying that when he started in the Central Mental Hospital, persons might have been in for a few months, received treatment and then were moved on. As I have said, the average length of stay is now more than four years. I was quite shocked to see that figure. It must also be built in that this is clearly a big factor in the decreased room for manoeuvre and the decreased facility for referring persons in from the Prison Service. We come then to this situation, to which Senator McDowell referred, where people within the Prison Service should be getting inpatient treatment in a hospital setting instead. I wanted to put those issues on the record. Again, however, I welcome the Bill.