Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party)
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453. To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality further to Parliamentary Question Nos. 595 and 596 of 1 March 2022, if she will instruct the Irish Prison Service to record data on protection prisoners broken down by ethnicity in view of the need to collect data for equality purposes given the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities, such as the Travelling Community, in the prison system. [12891/22]

Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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I can advise the Deputy that the collation and publication of the number of prisoners on protection is carried out through the Prison Population Census on a quarterly basis. 

The collation of this information is a manual process and therefore requires a considerable amount of time to complete. At present information on ethnicity is not routinely collected as part of this process.

However, the Irish Prison Service have advised me that going forward, where disclosed, the ethnicity of a prisoner on protection will be recorded in future iterations of the Census of Prison Population. 

The next Census of Prison Population is due to be completed in April 2022 and will be published on Irish Prison Service website www.irishprisons.ie, under Information Centre –  Statistics & Information – Census Reports.