Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The Irish Prison Service endeavours to assist prisoners to maintain relationships with their families. This is a core value underpinning their work.

In addition, the Irish Prison Service provides family-friendly training to ‘front of house’ staff, which aims to improve staff awareness of the effects of imprisonment on families and allows staff to appropriately support families and children visiting prisons.

The Service is acutely aware of the need for prisoners to maintain contact with their families and in that regard a video visit system was introduced which allowed families to continue to support those in custody during the pandemic.

The feedback on video visits from both families and prisoners has also been positive as it allows families to continue to support prisoners without having to make sometimes long journeys to the prison. When physical visits were reintroduced it was decided to continue to provide the video visit facility as it had proved to be a very successful initiative and the majority of those in custody are opting for some video visits over physical visits.

In 2023, there was in excess of 41,000 family video visits that took place.

The Deputy will wish to know, the Irish Prison Service recently advertised for the position of a National Family Connections Officer and an appointment will happen in the coming weeks. This role will identify and maximise opportunities for positive parent-child engagement within the limitations of a custodial setting.

Column A in Table 1 below provides information on the total number of visits to each prison in 2023 (as opposed to the total number of people who visited the prison). Column B provides the actual number of children (people under the age of 18) who visited each prison in 2023.

I have been informed by officials in the Irish Prison Service that it is not possible to say how many of the visits to each prison in 2023 had children among the visiting party. To get that specific information would require a physical examination of records which would take an inordinate amount of time and resources.

Table 1