Karl Dalton

Lock and House in Cavan, Shelton Abbey in Wicklow, Castlery Prison in Roscommon, they are building additional single occupancy rooms.

Do you welcome that?

We welcome that in the long term prison service, but in the short term it does nothing to alleviate the overcrowding.

For instance, if you look at the statistics today, there's probably 20 vacancies in the open centre.

So they spent £15 million building 30 pieces of accommodation and yet there's still 20 vacancies there.

Because the prisoners who are starting in the system are coming through because they're being released early because of the overcrowding and they're on temporary release.

The prisoners just aren't in the system.

The rehabilitation hasn't happened.

So it's really needed, acutely needed.

So you take Mount Joy, it has over 340 bunk beds gone in in the last few years and still has 65 on the floor.

But the 30 spaces being built in the open centre is not going to impact on that in the short term.

That's fanciful thinking by the Department of Justice in terms of, ideally, when we have a proper, stable prison service, you absolutely need this accommodation to rehabilitate people at the end of their sentence towards getting them ready for going out.

And that's morally justifiable.

But in the current climate, it's absolutely the wrong thing to build and the wrong place to build.

So what is the solution?

Well, there's a number of solutions that we've put forward.

The old Cork prison site is one.

The Cora prison sits there in the army camp and that would give us 140 places if that was refurbished and that wouldn't take much.

The E Block in Portlaoise is sitting empty.

There's an empty site in, there's four landings, there's maybe five prisoners in there.