Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his very comprehensive opening statement. I appreciate this is particularly technical legislation. I stand here between one barrister, namely, the Minister of State, and another, namely, Senator Ward, and I do not profess to have the same level of expertise or training as either of them.

This is welcome legislation. It is interesting to note in the statistics that 39.4% of the Luxembourg prison population is foreign while only 0.3% of the Polish or Romanian prison population is foreign. There are huge differences among EU countries in terms of prison populations being of their own nationalities or other nationalities. I can see where this is of benefit to people detained in one state whose family or background is in another state. The fact they can go back and be detained in another jurisdiction is beneficial possibly to them and certainly to their families in terms of visiting them and so on.

A point that intrigued me, maybe because of my previous time on the finance committee and as an accountant, is that if we get many Irish prisoners sent back from other countries, we are then paying to detain them in Ireland and the other jurisdiction is not. Do we just suck it up, a bit like the postal system in terms of letters arriving and going, and vice versa? I looked at various discussions on this and it never cropped up so I presume we take the hit for the people who arrive here and the foreign jurisdiction takes the hit for the people we send back to it.

This is humane, sensible legislation. It is unfortunate we were supposed to transpose this directive in 2011. We were here last night doing the communications regulation Bill, which was supposed to have been transposed by December 2020. We were two and a bit years overdue on that one. This one was an EU directive that was supposed to be transposed by December 2011 so I will not delay it any further. I welcome the Minister of State and welcome this legislation. Let us proceed to get it done.