The Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, in the training room of the new women's prison at Mountjoy, Dublin, which he opened yesterday, with Ms Kathleen McMahon, chief prison officer. Photograph: Paddy Whelan.
The Minister for Justice inaugurated the new £13 million women's prison at Mountjoy, Dublin, yesterday, saying he also intended to begin refurbishing the men's jail in the same complex.
Mr O'Donoghue said this work would begin "floor by floor, landing by landing" once remand prisoners currently held in Mountjoy Prison are transferred to Cloverhill Remand Prison in Clondalkin, Co Dublin, which will receive its first prisoners next week.
The new women's prison will hold 80 prisoners, who will be moved in within the coming months.
The 200-space Cloverhill Remand Prison and the 450-space Midlands Prison at Portlaoise are also due to be in operation by early next year.
Mr O'Donoghue said that once these prisons were operational he would be able to sign into law the terms of the 1996 bail referendum which are aimed at ending the so-called "revolving door" system of early temporary release for prisoners.
Mr O'Donoghue said he had been unable to bring in the legislation implementing the referendum "for the very simple reason that I had an insufficiency of space until now".
He said a revolving door syndrome had existed in the criminal justice system for more years than many cared to remember. "People have been released and are being released on the sole criterion that there is an insufficiency of space for them. You cannot enforce the judgments of the courts if that is the situation and that obviously leads to an undermining of confidence in the criminal justice system itself by society at large."
The new women's prison has small self-contained residential houses for about 10 prisoners each. The standard size of the cells is 11.7 sq m, an increase from the 8.4 sq m cells in the present women's prison. It also houses a bigger gym and a block dedicated to women's education and work training.
The Irish Penal Reform Trust commended the prison's design as "a model for new Irish prisons". However, its director, Dr Ian O'Donnell, said there was a need for serious debate about the extent to which there was a continued need to expand the penal system.
"It is difficult to understand why, at a time when crime rates are declining steeply, the Government is forging ahead with the biggest prison building programme in the history of the State. The key to reducing overcrowding and poor prison conditions is to reduce the flow of petty offenders into custody, not to warehouse them in ever-increasing numbers."
The Probation and Welfare Officers' branch of the trade union IMPACT said the appointment of one probation and welfare officer to work with the prison's 80 inmates was wholly inadequate. Four officers would be needed to develop programmes on alcoholism, drug addiction, offending and aftercare, its press relations officer, Mr Patrick O'Dea, said.
The governor of Mountjoy Prison has harshly criticised the Government's decision to spend millions on millennium celebrations while allocating little if any resources to other more needy causes.
Mr John Lonergan said the latest information he had was that the State was setting aside £30 million for millennium entertainment. "I question how any society could spend that kind of money on entertainment when other areas need resources. The argument is put forward all the time that we have no resources but we seem to have our priorities wrong. It seems there are resources for things we don't need," he said.
He pointed to the huge benefit such a sum would be to Mountjoy Prison, which has just one psychologist visiting two days a week to attend to 770 men, many of whom have behavioural problems.
Mr Lonergan was speaking in Galway at a seminar on Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD).