HOSPITAL patients and staff are being endangered by the manner in which prisoners are taken to hospital for treatment, the conference was told.
The POA assistant general secretary, Mr Ray Murphy, told the 80 delegates representing the POA's 2,500 members that secure knits should be provided at hospitals to isolate prisoners from other patients.
"It is not uncommon to have two or three escorts of prisoners to each hospital in Dublin on any given day," he said. "We have seen again attempts by armed groups to take these prisoners and to plan their escape and activate their escape using guns and weapons.
New arrangements were needed, he said. When prisoners stayed overnight in hospital, they were usually given beds in public wards with a prison officer guard but no armed guard. The danger and disruption which resulted could not be allowed to continue.
Safe, secure areas for in patient treatment of offenders will have to be provided in order to protect everyone involved."
He added that prisoners should be brought to out patient clinics outside normal clinic hours, and that their visits should staggered to limit the number of prisoners in the clinics at any time.
The assistant general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Mr Kevin Duffy, focused on the relationship between poverty, unemployment and me in his address to the conference.
He said controlling crime had become an issue not just for prison officers, but for all trade unions. Tackling long term unemployment should be part of the overall campaign to combat the drugs and crime problem.
"Long term institutionalised unemployment creates the conditions in which young people find an outlet in drug abuse which quickly leads them into the vicious circle of crime," he said.
"The fact that so many long term unemployed families manage to live lives free of drugs and crime is a great achievement, but it does not disprove the link be tween unemployment, poverty, drugs and crime."