Seanad debates

Monday, 14 December 2020

Central Mental Hospital (Relocation) Bill 2020: Committee and Remaining Stages

 

2:00 pm

Photo of Michael McDowellMichael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I infamously said that. That was false optimism on my part. We have to have places for serious criminals for whom preventative detention is important, such as gangland figures.We have already increased the remission for good behaviour from one quarter to one third, and all of this has been done by regulation, etc., but we should not be under any illusion that we will be able to reduce significantly the number of people in Irish prisons. We do not have a very high imprisonment rate in comparison with most places in Europe, and for all our faults, we are not one of the great imprisoning societies of the world, and we are good on that.

Going back to Senator Murphy's point, I would not like to be taken as disregarding his point by failing to mention it. On different occasions, Senators Murphy and Boyhan have served on prison visiting committees, and I know, from private conversations, that they both took their functions very seriously. There was a time when it was thought that this was a gravy train that the Minister for Justice used as a kind of informal honours system to get cronies into various places. Even if that did happen to some extent, I found that those who served on prison visiting committees suddenly had their eyes opened. Indeed, as Senator Murphy said, whatever their motives were in volunteering to serve, they performed a very valuable function and they humanised a system which needed it. In those circumstances, I will withdraw this amendment, and I will not be moving my other amendment.

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