For the first time in a very long time there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic that progress, long overdue, is being made on reorganising the prison service and reducing prison officers' overtime.
If as an extension to progress on that front there is parallel progress more generally - in terms of relations between prison staff and their immediate employer, the Irish Prison Service, and the ultimate policy making authority, the Government - it will be not before its time. The running of our prisons has been something of an industrial relations and management scandal stretching back decades. Justice Minister Michael McDowell deserves credit for setting out to do something about it.
The background to all this is that the State employs some 3,200 prison officers - a figure that computes not far off a 1:1 ratio of officers to prisoners: one of the highest in the industrialised world. On top of that, work practices that give rise to unsustainable manning levels and an absence of up-to-the-minute technology means that some basic grade officers are able to earn more than €100,000 a year because of overtime. Across the service, this posed an annual overtime bill of some €60 million which the Cabinet, at the urging of the Department of Finance and the enthusiastic support of Mr McDowell, has been trying to reduce by €25 million. Prison officers have been fortunate that the past 10 years of economic boom, coupled with the early release of republican prisoners under the Belfast Agreement, has to some extent hidden this bill. But if the Government were not to tackle matters now when, to some extent, it is possible to buy out the problem painlessly, matters would be all the worse - for prison staff and other taxpayers - in leaner times.
Previous efforts to reach agreement with prison officers have come to grief, despite being recommended by union leaders. By a margin of two to one, rank and file officers rejected a deal earlier this year that would have set salaries of between €48,000 and €70,000 including an average of seven hours overtime each per week and a one-off payment of €13,750. In the face of that rejection, Mr McDowell began a process of prison closure and threatened to contract out, or privatise, certain aspects of the service, notably the escorting of prisoners between jails, and between jails and court appearances.
The rejected deal is back on the table, together with an offer by Mr McDowell to finesse the overtime requirement so that those who do not want to work it do not have to. The Minister is also willing to re-examine the closure of Spike Island Prison but only if the deal on offer is accepted this time around. Prospects for that seem greater now than before. The meeting of prison officers that endorsed the deal yesterday was a special delegate conference, not just a negotiating team of union officers. It is to be hoped that that recommendation to the Prison Officers Association membership may not fall on deaf ears.