Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein)
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206. To ask the Minister for Justice and Equality the number of persons that were sentenced to jail time in the years 2011 and 2012 and the durations of same. [24719/13]

Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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I can advise the Deputy that there were 13,526 committals under sentence to prison in 2012 compared with 12,990 in 2011. The table below shows the sentence length of those committed under sentence in 2012 and 2011.

Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein)
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207. To ask the Minister for Justice and Equality the number of persons that were sentenced to jail for non payment of fines in 2011 and 2012; the amount of fines involved and the length of sentence they served. [24720/13]

Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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I can inform the Deputy that the number of committals to prison for non-payment of a court order fine in 2012 was 8,304. The 2011 figure was 7,514 . It is not possible to provide the amount of the fines involved or the length of sentence for each case, as this would necessitate a manual search of each record and would require a disproportionate and inordinate amount of staff time and effort and could not be justified where there are other significant demands on resources. However, I can advise the Deputy that the proportion of persons in custody for non-payment of fines at any time is a minute fraction of the overall prisoner population. To illustrate this point on 21 May 2013 there were 13 persons in custody for non-payment of a fine out of a total prison population of 4,269.