Labour leader Eamon Gilmore called for prison officers to be allowed to arrest a person bringing drugs into prison.
Mr Gilmore said: "We have an absurd situation where a prison officer cannot arrest a visitor who is discovered bringing in drugs for a prisoner. Unless gardaí are available or come quickly enough, these people must be released." This should be a start to "tackling the problem of large quantities of drugs being brought into prisons on a regular basis", following The Irish Times' revelation that 40,000 prisoners had tested positive for drugs over the past three years.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said, however, it should be highlighted that many of the tests "were carried out on prisoners who had just been committed and relate to drug use prior to imprisonment".
Mr Gilmore replied that "the prison staff must have been up all night testing prisoners".
Mr Ahern said tough security measures had been introduced "and we must take the carrot and stick approach". He added: "The security in place is the same as that employed at airports and is thus at a very high level. Previously it involved only random checks." Some 500 prisoners were on supervised methadone maintenance programmes at any one time and "these prisoners are initially tested at least twice weekly and tend to be tested in any case, even if they have been in prison for some time, at least once a week. This amounts to some 30,000 tests."
When Mr Gilmore called for prison officers to be given the power of arrest, Mr Ahern said: "I am not sure of the legal consequences of that." Mr Gilmore reiterated that "prison officers do not have the power of arrest. They cannot detain visitors bringing drugs into prisons." He said the Government had promised over an 11-year period to make prisons drugs free "but what it has delivered is prisons where drugs are freely available".
He asked if, "given the quantity of drugs in prisons and the numbers of prisoners testing positive for drug use, whether there is not some type of unofficial policy of keeping prisoners drugged and perhaps quietened rather than addressing the use of drugs and access to drugs in prisons". Mr Ahern said staff had the power to carry out random mandatory drug tests on prisoners only since last October.
