Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

-----to ensure that it was not done. There is a right of appeal to the Circuit Court but there are people who fall through those cracks and end up in Mountjoy Prison. Their lives are ruined forever.

The time has come for the Department of Justice to face up to the issue. It has between 20 and 30 acres of city-centre prime development land at Mountjoy. To start knocking bits of Mountjoy Prison down and building them up again is simply insane. It is a waste of taxpayers' money. The time has come for the Department to say that it will shift the prison - obviously it will take some time - to Thornton Hall. If it is to build units, it should build them out there. In addition, there should be a decent women's prison. Women get a fair crack of the whip in terms of the justice system, fairer sometimes than men. Men are sometimes jailed in circumstances that a woman would not be jailed for roughly the same kind of thing. That is a good instinct on the part of the Judiciary. I do not criticise it for that. To be honest, every time I see a woman sent to jail, which is very rare, I am reminded that the Dóchas centre is bursting at the seams. There are five women in a cell. Who is standing over this? Who is saying this is right? That is what is going on right now. I do not know what the situation is across the prison estates but it is, in my view, an emergency.

The Gary Douch affair was one in which a prisoner with psychiatric problems was put into a multiple-use cell with other prisoners. Gary Douch was one of those other prisoners and he was horribly killed by a prisoner who was suffering from insanity and had been negligently deprived of his medication. The prisoner in question was dumped in on top of them. The other people in that room knew he was being killed, but they were afraid even to raise the alarm because they feared for their own existence. The commission of investigation into that matter looked at the exact history and responsibility between the two prisons involved. Believe it or not, the fellow who did the killing was brought in from another prison because he was causing trouble there. There was a prisoner swap and that ended up with Mr. Douch being killed. That commission of investigation report allocated responsibility. Because the media did not like the finger of blame being pointed in particular ways at the time, it never published the full extent of what had been found and the blame that was there. I will not put it any further than that.

I was going to talk about some of the other measures, including barrister-solicitor partnerships. I will not do that now. I had only two minutes on the Order of Business, so I will use this opportunity to welcome what Senator Wilson says, and what Senator Conway is saying too by nodding his head. We have got to face up to the prison crisis. Somebody will be found ministerially and administratively to be blamed for something really bad happening very soon, and Ireland will suffer international condemnation for the state of its prisons, if we do not act now.