Saoirse Brady

We've seen this from other jurisdictions.

You know, you need to be very clear about when it will be activated and whether it will capture the context properly.

as to what led to that activation, you know, what was said between the prison officer and the person in prison just beforehand that merited the prison officer turning it on, you know, who said what to who.

So you need a wider context, you know, to ensure that any footage that is captured actually indicates what actually happened.

It's certainly the main thing.

And we see that.

We've seen, again, evidence from other jurisdictions which look at increases in assaults when you have overcrowded cells.

And at the moment, we have two, three, four people sharing a cell the size of a car park space.

So you can imagine that tensions are heightened.

I know the Prison Officers Association also talked about the introduction of more contraband into the prisons.

And what we have seen are more potent synthetic drugs coming into prison.

And obviously those can raise tensions as well and result in...

in issues between maybe prisoners themselves or prison staff and people in prison.

So I think we need to deal with a lot of these things.

But again, it's looking at de-escalation.

One of the other things that's being talked about is the introduction of incapacitant spray or pepper spray.

We made a detailed submission and we presented to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice last year.

They had published their report in November and they have recommended that pepper spray or incapacitant spray, as it's known, is not...

to be introduced widely across the prison estate.

At the moment, only guards can carry pepper spray.