Sharon Keogan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

If ever there was a stark example of how the misallocation of resources caused by the Irish asylum industry is eating our State alive, it is detailed in this week's report by the Irish Penal Reform Trust on overcrowding. Our prison service, just like our education and health services, is swamped and the Department of Justice is doing everything in its power to cover up this reality as it considers the ghastly prospect of early release for convicts.

According to the report, community services could come to replace many aspects of penal servitude with even those convicted of sexual crimes to be potentially released in the hope that a simple ankle tag will prevent them from reoffending. Would you trust a simple ankle tag to prevent a convicted rapist from reoffending should they be released back into the community? I certainly would not for my family, which is why I worry about the prioritisation of international protection applicants over keeping Irish prisons operational. Thornton Hall, which was previously earmarked as a new custom prison to cater for an overflow from Mountjoy, is instead now designated to become an asylum megacentre providing tented accommodation for potentially thousands of international applicants.

While Irish prisons struggle with a spike in drug deaths, there is rampant crime and a growing wave of dysfunction in the Department of Justice, which is eager to trade away valuable development sites to provide for disproportionately bogus asylum applicants. There is a genuine, compassionate argument for an increase in non-custodial sentences or vocational programmes to replace penal servitude, something for which many reformers have advocated for years. This is, however, no argument for the implementation of reckless early release schemes to feed an asylum system that continues to mutate out of control.

Ireland's prison population has seen one of the fastest growth rates in Europe, with a 12% increase in the incarceration rate between 2022 and 2023. It stands to reason that we desperately need every acre of prison space we can get to grapple with this issue. Ideally, this would free up a prime site at Mountjoy for eventual development. The French author Victor Hugo once wrote "he who opens a school door, closes a prison." Perhaps a modern Irish variation would be closing a prison to open an asylum centre.