Striking prison doctors threaten to resign

General practitioners servicing the State's 16 prisons are threatening to resign in a serious escalation of a dispute with prison management over pay and conditions.

The Irish Medical Organisation said it would hold a national meeting of prison doctors next Wednesday, when it was "increasingly likely" that a decision would be made to resign "en masse" from the prison medical services.

The move follows the decision of the Prison Service to bring in doctors from the Defence Forces to treat prisoners for the first time in the history of the State.

The Prison Service said it was left with no option but to seek the assistance of two Defence Forces doctors after the State's 23 prison doctors went on strike two weeks ago. The low level of healthcare provision to the 3,000-strong prison population was "putting prisoners' lives at risk", it said.

Management has called on the doctors to allow the dispute be resolved by a binding recommendation of the Labour Court.

However, the IMO said there was no statutory provision for its doctors to accept binding arbitration, adding that the appropriate forum for the resolution of the dispute was the Labour Relations Commission.

Mr Finbarr Murphy, deputy director of industrial relations at the IMO, said: "We agreed with their request to go to the LRC but the Prison Service failed to engage with that. They cannot abuse the industrial relations machinery of the State."

However, the director general of the Prison Service, Mr Seán Aylward, said it was the IMO which had refused to proceed to third-party adjudication, adding that this had "created a healthcare crisis for prisoners and put the security of our prisons at risk".