MINISTER FOR JUSTICE Jim O’Callaghan will be told today that there are 358 prisoners sleeping on the floor in Irish prisons – double the number previously described as unacceptable by one of his government colleagues.
O’Callaghan, after addressing the Irish Prison Officers’ Association’s Annual Delegate Conference in Galway today, will hear that overcrowding in Irish prisons is creating an unsafe working environment for staff.
Overcrowding, which President of the Association Tony Power describes as a “major concern” among prison officers, is impacting almost every prison in Ireland.
As of yesterday, 5,344 people were in custody in the nation’s prisons. 358 of that total were sleeping on top of mattresses on the floor, according to the official daily statistics from the Irish Prison Service.
The service began officially recording the number of mattresses on the floor this week.
The number of people sleeping on the floor is more than double the amount which Tánaiste Simon Harris labelled “not good enough” during his tenure as justice minister in 2023.
Speaking today, Power will tell the event: “Previous ministers made hollow promises of 650 extra spaces with new builds promised for Cloverhill, Midlands and Castlerea and a four-story block on the grounds of the old Separation Unit in Mountjoy.
“Two years on and not a sod has been turned on any of these projects”.
Department of Justice plans have allocated almost €50 million to start delivery plans at Ireland’s four main prisons – Castlerea, Cloverhill, the Midlands and Mountjoy – to accommodate an extra 670 people each year.
File image of a prison cell at Cloverhill Prison in Dublin. Rolling News
Rolling News
A spokesperson for Irish Prison Service has previously said the injection of funding will potentially add 1,100 more spaces on stream between 2024 and 2030.
The Irish Prison Officers’ Association has regularly met with O’Callaghan since his appointment in January to stress staff’s concerns about overcrowding, Power will say.
It says “nothing” will change unless the issue is addressed through the allocation of funding in next year’s budget to create more prison spaces in Ireland.
Unsafe conditions for staff
Power will say today that he does not “want to sound alarmist, but if we don’t find an immediate solution to this problem, we will have a tragic event or some form of crisis on our hands”.
It is understood that the minister will also be confronted today on the lack of resources available to staff in Irish prisons and will be presented with images of contraband – including drugs, phones and weapons – which have recently been seized.
There is a total of 4,666 beds in the Irish prison system but the service’s standard practice has been to maintain a safe working capacity was understood to be keeping up to 300 beds free. This allowed for a safe ratio of staff to people in custody.
But as more people are committed to Irish prisons, fewer free beds are kept free and the number of prisoners sleeping on the floor increases. The number of people on temporary release has also increased, with nearly 600 people serving sentences outside of custody.
As previously reported by The Journal, prison management has been accused of using the system as a “release valve” to alleviate the pressure the system is facing from overcrowding.
O’Callaghan has previously voiced support for introducing measures which mitigate the ‘clogging up’ of prisons through the imposition of sentences on people convicted of crimes such as shoplifting or those living with addition.
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