Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

First of all, I welcome the Minister of State to the House.

This Bill is a catch-all measure. I have no objection to that. There are little things that have to be done right across the Department of Justice's portfolio of responsibilities and instead of having a separate Bill for each of them, a catch-all Bill of this kind is a useful vehicle to get them moving.

On the Order of Business today, I asked for a debate on the future of prison policy and the Acting Leader said that he would contact the Department. When I say "a debate", I do not mean ten-minute statements but a real and serious debate about where we are going and what the plan is. The Minister, Deputy Harris, is going to the prison officers' conference today and apparently he will announce that he proposes to demolish the separation unit in Mountjoy Prison and build a 100-cell accommodation unit on the site. The simple fact is that Mountjoy Prison is wholly unsuitable, as Senator Wilson has said. I visited it in 2019. Huge improvements had been achieved by successive governors over the state of affairs that applied when Gary Douch died in appalling circumstances when I was Minister. A commission of investigation was launched into that death. Its report makes sobering reading about the poor administration of the prison at that time, the savagery with which Mr. Douch was killed by a fellow inmate and the negligence that brought it all about. However, we now have between 150 and 200 prisoners sleeping on the floor. We have four prisoners sharing bunks in a cell. The Dóchas prison centre is overcrowded to the extent of 170% of capacity. I do not know what the rate of rotation of the revolving door is now but the circumstances are that as far as this prison is concerned, we will be on the wrong end of a United Nations committee on torture report which will point out that this Dickensian prison needs to be demolished.

As Senator Wilson said, in the early 2000s I sold Shanganagh Prison for housing development. Eventually, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council acquired it and it was handed over to the Land Development Agency. The bones of 20 years later, they are turning the sod to build the first house there. We got €30 million for it. When we spent the €30 million we got for the 30 acres in Shankill on acquiring a 150-acre site at Thornton Hall, we set about building roads and services and carrying out earthworks, etc, on that premises. It was intended as a site for a modern up-to-date prison with facilities such as open-air football pitches. It would have allowed for the separation of categories of prisoners. It would have brought an end to the bullying that arises from overcrowding, as the prison officers' chief has said, along with the violence and the threat of violence. If you are sharing a floor with a whole load of other people and lying on a mattress on that floor, you are obviously in need of protection. I am not saying this in any way to be critical of the people who do their best to try to operate the Prison Service. We stopped Thornton Hall because the money ran out in 2009. One can share the blame, and I will take my part of the blame for that, but now is the time to rebuild it and get on with it.