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LAST UPDATE | 21 hrs ago
OVERCROWDING IS IMPACTING every prison in the country and 358 people are now sleeping on mattresses on the floor, the Irish Prison Officers’ Association has said.
Speaking this morning in Galway, where the association is hosting its annual conference, President of the union Tony Power said the issue must be addressed as a matter of urgency.
Power said that one landing in the Midlands Prison in Co Laois is housing 90 people in 30 cells which were designed to accommodate one prisoner nearly two decades ago. He added that up to 25 people in the section of the prison are sleeping on the floor.
Justice minister Jim O’Callaghan was told by the Prison Officers’ Association this morning that overcrowding is creating an unsafe working environment for staff, who see the high number of people in prison as a “major concern”.
Opening the event today, O’Callaghan said work is underway to provide remedies to the issue through the work of a new emergency response group made up of staff from his department, the Irish Prison Service and members of the union.
He told reporters this morning: “We need to accelerate the process of finding extra spaces within the prisons that we have. When you look at the programme for government we’ve indicated that we’re going to get 1,500 new spaces.”
O’Callaghan added: “We need more spaces and it is the function of government and my specific responsibility to insure that more spaces have been made available and will be made available in the future.”
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 said: “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.
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. Speaking on that previous commitments, O’Callaghan said he can “see an avenue to get them”.
He said: “In terms of the traditional method of constructing and going through public procurement and going through the national spending code takes time. I have to accelerate that.”
He added: “The avenue is to try and speed up the process by trying to remind my colleagues in government about the nature of the crisis that exists in prisons and getting funding in place immediately in order to address it over the next 12 to 18 months.”
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.
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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