Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 26 September 2024
Committee on Key Issues affecting the Traveller Community
Travellers in Prison: Discussion
10:30 am
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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I welcome our guests. I remind people of their privileges and that they cannot participate if they are outside of Leinster House, etc. Those giving evidence have to be physically present within the grounds of Leinster House and should not criticise or make charges against any person, or identify him or her by name or in such a way that makes him or her identifiable. I think we all understand that.
I propose that we publish the opening statements from our witnesses. Is that agreed? Agreed. I suggest that we invite our witnesses to speak for five or ten minutes and that we allow members to ask questions and make comments for approximately five minutes. Members may ask more questions after everybody gets an opportunity to speak.
The committee is looking at Travellers' experience of the justice system. Today we will focus on Travellers in prison. The committee has already visited Castlerea Prison, Mountjoy Female Prison - the Dóchas Centre - and Oberstown Children Detention Campus. Travellers represent less than 1% of the population yet we make up 8% of male prisoners, 16% of female prisoners and 21% of children detained. The committee looks forward to hearing from our witnesses about this very important subject. We would like to hear about the experience of Travellers dealing with the justice system, including prison, and how we can make things better.
We are grateful to our witnesses for coming here today. They include representatives of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, the Traveller Justice Initiative, the Traveller Mediation Service and Barnardos.
Our witnesses are all very welcome here today.
It is very important for us as a committee to examine the justice system and, most importantly, why there are so many Travellers in prison in this country and what supports we need for Travellers. I am sure we all know the answers but it is important we document those answers and that this committee has a responsibility to work with the Traveller community.
We will begin with one quote a young man said to me in 2020. It was his first time to be in court and he was very nervous. I said to him he will be okay and that everything will be fine. He said, "No Eileen, I am already guilty." I said no, he would not be and that was up to the judge. He said, "I am guilty on the basis of being a member of the Traveller community." I want us all to be mindful of that before we start.
I will open it up to our witnesses. I ask Ms Saoirse Brady to begin.
Ms Saoirse Brady:
I thank the Cathaoirleach and the committee for the invitation to speak here today on this important issue. The IPRT last presented to the previous committee in 2021 and, unfortunately, many of the same issues remain.
For those who do not know us, the Irish Penal Reform Trust is Ireland’s principal non-governmental organisation working for systemic penal reform. Our vision is a just, humane Ireland where prison is used as a last resort. Our mission is to advocate for a progressive criminal justice system that prioritises alternatives to prison, upholds human rights and champions reintegration. We do this through research, campaigning and changing attitudes. As Senator Flynn mentioned, according to the last census, Travellers make up less than 1% of the overall population yet are severely over-represented in the prison system in particular.
On the statistics the Senator mentioned, those statistics come from August 2024 but we do know that at other times, women, for example, in Dóchas, have made up to 25% of people in prison, or of women in prison, I should say. When we think of the two women's prisons in particular, they are the most severely and regularly overcrowded in the State, I would say.
Something I would like to pick up on is that the Traveller community is also over-represented in probation statistics. In 2022, Irish Travellers of all genders comprised an estimated 9% of those engaged with the Probation Service. As was mentioned, while young Travellers are over-represented in Oberstown Children Detention Campus, there is only one mention of them in the current youth justice strategy, and that is certainly not enough.
While we welcome the introduction of an ethnic identifier to support the State in building out ethnic equality monitoring, we do not feel that data is always complete, and it is not routinely and regularly published. We have statistics for the Irish Prison Service published every single day, so we would like to see that ethnic data being published more regularly, and we should not have to ask for it as advocates. We would ask the Irish Prison Service, IPS, and the Probation Service to collate and regularly disseminate and publish that up-to-date, accurate statistical information on ethnicity, and that would include data on people held in pre-trial detention - currently, one in five people out of the general prison population is held in pre-trial detention - looking at who is serving a custodial sentence and who is engaging with the Probation Service.
The last time we appeared before the previous committee, we were about to publish a piece of research. In 2022, we published it and it is called “Sometimes I’m Missing the Words”: The Rights, Needs and Experiences of Foreign National and Minority Ethnic Groups in the Irish Penal System. The research was funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. It was completed by researchers in Maynooth and included a focus on the experience of Irish Travellers. It looked at it in the context of policy and law at national and international level.
Again, the report raised the issue of accurate and incomplete data. It carried out an analysis of IPS committals for a 12-month period but it found that no ethnic data was recorded for more than 22% of committals. With those gaps and discrepancies and without the full analysis, we do not have the full picture of who was actually in the prison system, and not everybody self-identifies either. We need to find a way to ensure we have all the data available to us.
The research also examined why certain groups were over-represented in the criminal justice system, and I know that is something the committee wants to discuss today. It highlighted a number of underlying factors that have a particular impact on ethnic minorities, and I do not think they would be a surprise to anybody: low educational attainment, homelessness, unemployment and racism, including anti-Traveller prejudice. Another key finding was that experiences of racism at different stages of the criminal justice process had the effect of limiting trust with any part of the penal system.
If we want to ensure accountability in the prison system and help to restore confidence in the penal system overall, we urge the Department of Justice to complete, and prioritise the completion of, the ongoing review of the Prison Rules 2007. Those rules touch on almost all aspects of prison life, from admission right through to health and education. The review also provides an opportunity to insert a positive obligation to eliminate discrimination and ensure the rules comply with the public sector duty set out in section 42 of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act 2014.
Along with the review, part of that was to allow for a streamlined and robust complaints system, and for the Office of the Ombudsman to take jurisdiction of prisoner complaints. If we want to address racism across the prison estate and promote a positive prison culture, and we have an opportunity to do that as well in the forthcoming Irish Prison Service Bill 2023, there must be a functioning complaints system that people have faith in, which can hold the prison authorities to account and which can provide proper redress when things go wrong. The research I mentioned found that “the current complaints system is ineffective in addressing complaints concerning racism” in particular. A robust complaints system in which staff and prisoners have confidence would support better management of prisons and result in better outcomes for everyone. This is especially relevant in a context where we have record levels of overcrowding across the prison estate. In June, for the first time ever, we hit the 5,000 mark in prisons, and that is not a record any of us wanted to break. It places huge pressure on prison staff and it puts even more pressure on necessary but already overstretched services and resources, like mental health and addiction services in particular.
While the changes I have mentioned would benefit everybody in the prison system, the IPRT believes there should be a dedicated strategy for Travellers in the criminal justice system overall. They face specific challenges, and those are not addressed in current policy or strategy. It needs to look at issues such as being over-represented in the criminal justice system but also the stigma experienced and the high level of need within the community in terms of mental health, addiction, literacy, low educational attainment and other relevant issues that particularly impact Travellers. We urge the committee to support that call.
The Irish Penal Reform Trust and the Traveller Justice Initiative have jointly written to the Office of the Inspector of Prisons to ask for a thematic inspection focused on Irish Travellers in prison. We would also like to have one on ethnic minorities more widely but specifically on Irish Travellers. We think this would help to shed some light on the lived experience of Travellers in prison and could be used to better inform policy and service delivery. I am happy to answer any questions following the opening statements.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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I thank Ms Brady for that. It was very good and very insightful, and it is important we are having this conversation. I know that. I call Ms Anne Costello and Ms Ann Marie Sweeney.
Ms Anne Costello:
I thank the Chair and committee members for allowing us to address them. The overall aim of the Traveller Justice Initiative is to embed positive change in policy and practice of the justice system that will produce positive outcomes for Travellers, their families and the broader community. We are funded by the Irish Prison Service and the Probation Service, and we are now being hosted by the Irish Penal Reform Trust.
I acknowledge the huge commitment of this committee to the issue of Travellers in the justice system, and we greatly appreciate that. Senator Flynn referred earlier to the visits to the prisons, etc., and that has had a huge impact. When I spoke to the committee in 2021, I spoke about the over-representation of Travellers and the similarities with other ethnic minorities and indigenous groups around the world with regard to the causes and factors leading to that over-representation, so I am not going to go into that in great detail.
As Ms Brady said, the latest statistics show us that 8% of all prisoners are Traveller prisoners.
Collecting data is important for us in trying to influence outcomes for Travellers in the system, as we need to understand their situation, but we have concerns about the accuracy of the data. If the statistics are correct, then the percentage of Travellers in the prison population has reduced by two percentage points recently. Unfortunately, I do not believe that to be the case. The Prison Service has committed to gathering data on Travellers at committal and interview stages, but a number of Travellers have approached me to say they have never been asked about their ethnicity. In 2019, the Prison Service undertook a census of all Travellers in prison. That was a good process and we worked on it collaboratively. We are asking that the service do it again so that we can have an accurate count of the number of Travellers in prison.
We have been advocating for us to write joint reports with the Prison Service, as context is important. Figures on their own can be meaningless. Where enrolment in education is concerned, for example, throwing a box of crayons into someone’s cell is counted the same as someone doing an Open University degree. We want to work with the Prison Service on a joint report analysing why the figures are the way they are.
When this committee visited the Dóchas Centre, the psychologist there spoke about women in prison. She stated that, in her experience, women in prison were often victims of more serious crimes than those they had committed themselves. This is our experience also.
Since the presentation in 2021, there has been a positive development in that an application by the National Traveller Women’s Forum and us to the Department of Justice has been successful. We are pleased we are now working in partnership with Barnardos and that it is delivering a service for Traveller women at all stages in the criminal justice system – as soon as they come into contact with the law, while they are in prison and post release. Most importantly, this is done working with their families. I am delighted Ms O’Shea and Ms Carroll from Barnardos are in attendance to discuss this further.
It is our hope we can extend this model of support to all prisons. As Barnardos will explain, the level of demand from women has far exceeded our expectations. There has been considerable engagement. The complexity of the women’s issues has also been somewhat surprising. We are asking for additional funding for Barnardos' work and for an extension of that type of support to all Travellers in prison and their families. We applied to the Department of Justice and I am delighted to say that we have had a very positive response. We are awaiting post-budget announcements. It will be a therapeutic, flexible and trauma-informed model and will start producing outcomes for Travellers in the criminal justice system.
Ms Brady alluded to issues for Travellers in prison, for example, racism and discrimination. Travellers also raise with me issues of racist language and behaviour from other prisoners and, more seriously, prison staff. Those concerns have also been raised in reports by the Office of the Inspector Prisons and the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Ms Sweeney and I have delivered training to prison staff, but one-off training for staff with deeply ingrained anti-Traveller attitudes is not going to make a great difference. We are asking for a proactive approach that clearly sets out there is zero tolerance for racist language and behaviour. There have to be disciplinary consequences for people who continue to engage in such language and behaviour. People can dismiss language as only being words, but it can be damaging for people in prison, particularly Travellers.
A positive development has been in the area of pre-sentence reports. Judges ask probation officers to write reports on offenders in terms of their circumstances and likelihood of reoffending. From our work with the Probation Service, we realise that the risk assessment tool it uses can be discriminatory towards Travellers. Risk levels are higher for people who leave school early, are unemployed, have insecure housing, etc. Due to structural inequalities, many Travellers fall into these categories without ever being involved in crime. For this reason, we are delighted the Probation Service has changed its risk assessment tool. It is also working with us on developing guidelines on how it should interpret risk assessments. If we do not do this, then Travellers will be disproportionately affected by the assessments and end up getting harsher sentences.
We are pleased we were invited to make a presentation to the District Court judges’ annual conference this year. Ms Sweeney also presented at that. It was a useful opportunity to meet judges and speak to them about Travellers. Many judges acknowledged that, although they saw Travellers inside and outside their courts every day, they knew very little about the challenges Travellers faced. Their willingness to learn and engage was assuring. We hope to continue working with the judges in the context of the pre-sentence reports. Ms Sweeney shared her personal experiences at the conference, and I believe we will have an opportunity to hear them today. We are optimistic we might make some progress on non-custodial sentences for Travellers and community-based supports to address the underlying causes of Travellers’ offending behaviours.
Simply imprisoning people is a short-sighted solution. If people are incarcerated and released without any rehabilitation, they are likely to reoffend and we are just creating a very expensive revolving door, with people leaving prison more damaged than when they went in. We have to address the underlying causes for Travellers committing crimes and invest in support systems to help them resolve these issues. For those who are imprisoned, we must at least ensure prison does not cause further harm.
Ms Ann Marie Sweeney:
I thank the committee for inviting me to this meeting. I am here to speak on behalf of women in prison. As a mother and a lady who has been in prison, I see the challenges girls face in and out of prison.
I grew up as a Traveller in poverty with a lot of discrimination in a community that felt like it rejected me at the beginning. School was not much different, so my expectation of the outside world was that we were not good enough. It became the norm. They say racist words do not hurt, but when you are constantly being rejected and put down by a system and a community, it has an impact on you. It takes a lot of years for you to realise that. You think it is because of your upbringing or things around you. It is not, but it takes its toll, which grows with you.
My first crime was to survive. I was a mother when I was very young and I struggled because I was brought up with a mindset of not asking for help, not trusting people because they had always put us down and so on. There was that conflict within me. My first criminal act was to put food on the table for me. If I did not do that, there would have been times when life would have been much more difficult. I did not know the road it would take me down. As I went through life and had many struggles, I ended up in addiction. I had a serious car accident at the age of 20, which left me on heavy medication. That is where my road started. Shortly after, I did a couple of prison sentences. I was put into the prison system.
Addiction took its toll on me and my family, including my kids. I am six kids and a few sentences in the Dóchas Centre later. Although Dóchas was a chance for me to go in and refresh, I went in there with my six kids spread across Ireland with different family members who were trying to cope with the situation. I could only get to talk to one of those kids for a couple of minutes each day. I did not really know what was going on. That alone caused me worry and stress inside prison. The way I am as a mother, if I know the kids are all right, it gives me peace.
My mental health suffered when I was in prison.
My health went downwards when I was in prison. I did not have the supports. If I had had that one person that I could have gone to who could have told me where my kids were, how they were doing and just to have had that connection, I might not have struggled so much and I would not have spent so many sentences in the Dóchas Centre. I am happy to say Barnardos is on board now and the feedback I get when I meet some of these young women that are mothers is positive. It is to have that one connection in there because you feel so isolated in there and you are just thrown in there. When you come back out, you are coming back out to do the exact same things because you face the exact same challenges. There is no difference. You are just getting some time to rest and you come back out through the revolving door, as the girls are saying here.
For me, it is the supports like Barnardos coming in and making the women feel like someone listening and someone cares, because when you are in there, you do not think anyone cares. You already come from a system that has failed you and you have been already been brought up in a way that is not good enough. When you are thrown into the system, you get that sense that you do not deserve to be a mother, that this is why you are here, and that if you had wanted to be a mother, you should not have done what you did and you should not be here. That is not what they would call a mother. That relationship between Barnardos and the girls that can connect the families together outside and inside is a great positive change in the prison and will only do great things for the girls. As far as I know and from the information I get, when the girls come out and I meet them, that is the first thing. I am very thankful to be here to give my input.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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I thank Ms Sweeney for her input and just to let the committee know, she received the Traveller Pride intersectionality award this year. I know with all my heart it is not easy to come in here and tell your story as a Traveller woman. It is hard for all Traveller women, but is it even tougher when you are a mother who has come through addiction and prison, with that sense of shame. I admire Ms Sweeney coming in here today for being honest and a role model for other mothers and women within our community. I am sure the members will have questions for you.
I call Ms Carroll from Barnardos, which is so important for Traveller women in prison.
Ms Clodagh Carroll:
I am the assistant director for children's services in Dublin north. I will hand over to Ms O'Shea but I work within Barnardos and I am here to be part of the discussion. Barnardos is grateful for the opportunity to be involved in this initiative for both learning and developing our work within the Dóchas Centre at the moment. Ms O'Shea is the project leader of this service, so I will hand over to her to talk through the details of how the service has evolved and is currently working with Traveller mothers in the Dóchas Centre.
Ms Heather O'Shea:
The Barnardos service supporting Traveller women in the prison system was established to provide intensive family support in partnership with the Traveller Justice Initiative and the National Traveller Women’s Forum. This followed a study carried out by the National Traveller Women's Forum in 2020 that highlighted a need for an enhanced programme of structured and intensive family support for Traveller mothers in the criminal justice system and their families.
The overall aim of the service is to work both collaboratively and individually with Traveller mothers in the criminal justice system and to support them in learning about the importance of their role as a mother, even when their children are not in their care. We aim to build and maintain positive communication and relationships with Traveller mothers and their children and families. We support them to meaningfully reflect on their own past traumas, adversities and past decision-making and the impact this has had on their children’s well-being and development. For a lot of these women, this is the first opportunity they have had to reflect in that way. We work to enhance their parenting skills and support these mothers to positively participate in their children’s lives.
Through focusing on the parent child relationship for these mothers and their children, we hope to offer more hope and possibilities, reduce the risk of re-offending for these mothers and positively influence trends of intergenerational offending. Just this week, one of the mammies turned around who would not have had a relationship with her children and said she feels mother-like. It was just after an access call with her child and for her, this was huge.
The service is funded through the Department of Justice with additional funding secured through the St. Stephen's Green Trust. The service began operating in February 2024, beginning with Traveller mothers who are already incarcerated in the Dóchas Centre. The service continues to provide support to Traveller mothers and their families upon release from prison. The Traveller mothers in the Dóchas Centre receive both individual one-to-one intensive family support and an opportunity to engage in group work sessions each week. To date, 22 Traveller mothers have had meaningful engagement with the service.
We incorporate the Barnardos informed approach and it underpins the nature of the work carried out. Both evidence-based programmes and tailor-made supports are provided to meet the identified needs of Traveller mothers, their children and families. All of the mothers engaging with the service present with concurrent and complex needs. In the course of both the group work and individual work, these mothers speak of their significant experience of domestic violence, addiction, mental health challenges and often a history of childhood trauma themselves. For the women, it gives them an opportunity to have that peer support in a group work setting because we are very conscious that having that conversation in a group facilitated by professionals is great but there can be a feeling of isolation in the aftermath of that. We have created a great community and the peer support piece follows on from that.
Ninety percent of the Traveller mothers who presented for group work in February had a history of alcohol or substance misuse. Eighty-three percent of women have described incidences of domestic violence as a characteristic of their previous or current relationships, and for the majority of these mothers this is not their first time in prison or their first offence.
Initially, there was a barrier to receiving referrals from the Traveller families themselves in the community. It was observed this was predominantly due to a lack of trust for external services due to poor past experiences with professionals. We have heard from a lot of family members they themselves had a poor experience of care as a child and returning back to their family in the Travelling community. The parent-child relationship is central to all of our work. At the point of engagement with the service, many mothers had little to no contact with their children at all.
Seventy-one percent of Traveller mothers who have engaged with this service have at least one child in the care of Tusla. Some were unaware of exactly where their children were and they struggled to identify with their role as a parent. They had little to no sense of the importance of their role as a parent and did not understand the importance of this role with their children. They showed no awareness of their rights to have any involvement regarding their children's lives or even any information in relation to them. We experienced that across the board with a lot of the women we came in contact with. Initially, we referred to them as mammies and for them that was huge. First, they were a Traveller, they were in prison and they were in addiction whereas we initially greeted them into the group as a mother, and for a lot of them, that was the first time that had happened in a long time.
Group work sessions include an element of reflection and discussion regarding the mother's past decision-making in relation their parenting. That did take some time but we are now at a point with a lot of the women who have been engaging over the past couple of months where they have very open communication within the group and with professionals to say that was wrong or that they can see it now but back then they did not, depending on the situation they were in at the time. That has been a huge learning for ourselves as professionals but also for the group. The individual work can include both tailor-made supports and Barnardos' evidence-based parenting programmes.
In the early stages of engagement, an assessment of need is completed with each mother and an individualised family support plan is developed. Mothers learn self-care and self-regulation techniques and their parenting role and basic parenting skills are explored before participating in more intense, parenting-based discussions, reflecting on the impact their past decision making has had on their children and their role as mothers. That was a huge learning for the mothers themselves to understand the children still want a relationship with them. It might not be in a caring role but it is still very important.
Most Traveller mothers who engaged in group work sessions have improved communication with their children and participated in their lives, including increased visits with their children and, for one mother, having her children returned to her care upon release. To date, we have supported 22 Traveller mothers with a potential positive impact for more than 40 children and three unborn babies. To reiterate what Ms Costello said, we have been able to do this much with just myself as one project worker. If we were able to go further, we could reach a lot more families.
Denise Mitchell (Dublin Bay North, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Ms O'Shea. Last but not least, I call Mr. Chris McDonagh to make his opening statement on behalf of the Traveller Mediation Service.
Mr. Chris McDonagh:
I thank Senator Eileen Flynn and the committee for inviting the Traveller Mediation Service. I will give a brief introduction to those, especially on the committee, who may not know the Traveller Mediation Service and the work we do. I will explain what we do on the outside but also what led us to work in peer mediation in the prison programme.
I have been working as a mediator and facilitator with the Traveller Mediation Service, TMS, since 2015. I took over as manager in January this year. TMS started as a response to a lot of conflict in the midlands. In 2014, a project co-ordinator-mediator and two mediators were appointed. A lot of this came from the riots in Mullingar, County Westmeath. When we started first it was the Midlands Travellers Conflict and Mediation Initiative, MTCMI. Thank God we have changed that to TMS. It used to be a lot of work trying to explain that. That was mainly because we had a lot of disputes in counties Westmeath and Longford, and some in Offaly, Laois and Tipperary. However, since I started in 2015, we have done a lot of work right across the Thirty-two Counties of Ireland. A lot of families would phone up from the Travelling community to ask if we just worked in the midlands or all over. That is why a couple of years ago we decided to change the name to TMS.
The Traveller Mediation Service is a partnership initiative, supported by Restorative Justice in the Community, RJC, and funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. We are based in Athlone, County Westmeath. We have four full-time staff and three part-time staff. The three part-time staff work one day, two days and four days per week. We take referrals from mainly the Twenty-six Counties, but we are getting a lot of cross-Border disputes, so we take in the whole Thirty-two Counties of Ireland.
There are two main strands to the work of the Traveller Mediation Service, which broadly can be divided into conflict intervention and prevention. The intervention work involves mediation of disputes around Ireland that involve Travellers against Travellers, Travellers against the wider community and Travellers against agencies such as the council, schools and An Garda. For the prevention work we have started training the Travelling community as mediators. The training programmes benefit Travellers so when they qualify as mediators and do not want to work with TMS, they can work with their own community and families when they get home. This course started in 2016 and 2017 in partnership with the Edward Kennedy institute in Maynooth University. Since then, we have run four Traveller mediation courses. It is a culturally inclusive training programme. It is the same course that any mediator in Ireland will do, but we have put the Traveller culture into it. Some of these mediators are fantastic but they have no literacy skills. We support them through the Edward Kennedy institute with that. We now have a panel of Traveller mediators around Ireland, made up of men and women, who are on the TMS panel. We are also providing peer mediation. We have panel members from different parts of Europe and different colours and religions are also on the panel with the TMS and we bring them in on different disputes.
The committee will hear a lot from me on things that started in 2016 and 2017. In 2016, we started doing dialogue days. The first one was with a group of Traveller mediators at Maynooth University. Since then, we have run dialogue days between the Traveller community and An Garda right around Ireland. I will give a little insight into that. The last one we did had four counties in it, which were the first main counties I mentioned of Longford, Offaly, Westmeath and Laois. We divided them into four Traveller projects with three staff members each and we invited between 14 and 16 gardaí from the counties to come in. The dialogue days are interesting. They show what it is like to be a garda on the front line and what it is like to be a Traveller for the first time. It shows the experience of both communities. It is an open discussion so people can say anything so long as they do not go over the line. People are honest with each other. It is beneficial. It has helped support the groups as we have left them. The Travelling community can now see what it is like being a garda, but gardaí can also see what it is like being a Traveller. As has been mentioned, my surname is McDonagh. Some people, not all, judge me for being a McDonagh. I have gone to third level. We try to show that. I have a certain family name, but we are all individuals, the same as gardaí. The dialogue days have been brilliant. We have just finished one in south Dublin, and hopefully before the year is out, we will run one in the Traveller projects on the northside of Dublin.
All of that falls into Castlerea Prison and peer mediation. There were some discussions with the Castlerea staff and management, the Travellers in Prison Initiative and Ms Costello and others. It was a response to a request from a lot of the men who did the Red Cross workshop in Castlerea Prison. They wanted more conflict resolution training. We were invited in to have a talk with them. We met with the staff and some of the prisoners. For us it was new. We never did anything like this before. It was the first time we had done it in a prison setting. We explained to the prisoners at the start that this was new for us and for them. They came along with us because what could work in schools and work with training on the outside are completely different to the environment in a prison. When we started, there were approximately 23 men on part one of the peer mediation course, and 11 of them were Travellers. What we have heard from 2016 to now is because it is more Traveller-led, more Travelling men and women are coming to the courses. The men who signed up for it did part one. It was a basic course on conflict resolution. It was a five-step programme, including the role of the mediator, confidentiality, issues that can be covered and boundaries, impartiality, listening and reflecting back, and using open questions, moving from positions to interests, reframing, and reaching agreement. All of this was done through practice and role play. Some of the hardest criminals in the system were doing these role plays. Without saying too much, it is a funny thing to watch how nervous they can get. I thought we would be nervous. After doing part one, 14 of the men wanted something else. They wanted more, so we decided to call it a part two peer mediation programme, with more in-depth mediation skills. Again, at the end of that we got somebody from the Mediators' Institute of Ireland, MII, to come in and test them over 25 minutes to a half hour. They did it in pairs. That was to give them an idea of what an accredited mediation course would look like. Again, after doing part two, a group of men wanted more. Instead of calling it an accredited course, the prisoners themselves called it part three. We decided to run part three, which was an accredited course. We did it over 12 weeks, and at the end of that we had two teachers and eight prisoners who became qualified mediators. It was the first time in the Irish prison system. Four of them were from the Traveller community. We then had Covid, and it stopped us going in. After Covid we went back in and this year we had three teachers and 17 prisoners from the Midlands Prison in Portlaoise and Cork Prison as qualified mediators. It was a huge turnout and more than half of them were from the Traveller community.
We have again been asked to go back into the Midlands Prison and there are prisons in the Dublin area that want us to come in. We are a small team, and our basis is mediation, but we see the benefits of this training and the programmes. We would like to see it run out on a phased basis between 2025 and 2027 so that all 12 prisons in Ireland will have the programme. Two of the men who did parts one and two in Cork Prison came to Portlaoise. I will be running the Portlaoise prison programme, and my colleague Frank Kavanagh will run it in Cork Prison. Because those two men did parts one and two in Cork, they could come along and do the accredited course in Portlaoise. We see the benefit of this. Working with a lot of these men on the inside from the Traveller community on mediation, they all said that if they had known about the mediation service before they could have got something before the courts. We work with a lot of these families on the outside now. It is not just for the Traveller community. As I said there are also people from eastern Europe. One fella from Cork has gotten out and is supporting a Traveller Mediation Service with a school down south, which I will not name. In sixth class and first year, young Traveller men and young men from Ukraine are fighting with each other. This man is Latvian, but I am not 100% sure of his name as Frank Kavanagh knows him better than I do. He speaks six different languages, and because he speaks Ukrainian, he will come in with us. This is what I am saying about the benefits of peer mediation.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were invited to Drogheda. Members of the African community and Travellers were fighting each other. Joseph, who is originally from Nigeria, did his master's degree with me. He and I were to go to Drogheda but because of the pandemic, we did not go. We see the benefits of working through mediation with the Traveller community. We also see the benefits to people of different communities who are getting involved.
We did training with people in units A and E of Portlaoise prison at the weekend. We did conflict resolution skills with them as political prisoners. There are four landings of men on unit E or unit A with whom nobody works. We work with level 4 and all the other levels now want this mediation. I stress that we cannot do it. We would love to be able to do so and would love to have the funding, going forward. I would love to see funding for these men and women who are trained as mediators in the prison setting. I know all prisoners cannot go back in but if we could get the prisoners from the Traveller community and non-Traveller communities who are now qualified mediators to come back in with TMS and deliver this training, it would show the prisoners there is a different cycle. It is not about getting out of prison only to come back in again. There is something behind us.
I will not go any further because I will be going over time. I will answer any questions that members have and thank them for listening.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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I thank Mr. McDonagh. I will talk about some of the work we have done. As a politician, I know the vital work that Mr. McDonagh has done for me in my role to allow me to connect, along with some local county councillors and TDs. The work is absolutely vital and needs to be funded.
Before I pass to Deputy Stanton, I apologise to the representatives of Barnardos. I had to run out to make a childcare-related phone call, which is typical.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the witnesses to the meeting. I had a role and an interest way back and I have met quite a number of the witnesses, including Mr. McDonagh and Ms Costello. In some senses, I get the feeling that there is progress here. I was particularly taken by what has been said about the parenting courses. As a former counsellor, I understand exactly what Ms O'Shea is talking about. She said at one stage that she would like more resources. What kind of resources does Barnardos have at the moment? What more resources would it need?
Ms Heather O'Shea:
At the moment, we are funded for just one project worker. It is a part-time role. We are also funded for a part-time practical family support worker. We are seeing a level of need in the prisons at the moment. Even in the Dóchas Centre, we are operating a waiting list for one-to-one support. Although some of the women are serving more lengthy sentences, it is the women who are serving shorter sentences who may be on the waiting list. We will work with them on their release rather than when they are in prison, which allows us to do an intensive piece of work. Our need is for more workers. I have had conversations with different community organisations and the Probation Service which is working with Traveller fathers. It is about them understanding the impact that having a father in prison can have on the whole family and the impact of reoffending and all that goes with it. There is a need to run the service another-----
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I think Ms Carroll would like to come in.
Ms Clodagh Carroll:
The vision of the service is that we are entrenched in the pre-sentencing piece, when people are incarcerated and in the post-release piece. We would also like to be able to support Traveller mothers and fathers who are in prison at all stages of their contact with the law and incarceration nationally. We cannot even meet the need in the Dóchas Centre alone. Women are engaging with us.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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What is Ms Carroll's request?
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Perhaps the committee could write to the Minister for Justice today to make that recommendation. Has Mr. Carroll a figure for the cost of that?
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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That is very good. That was a concrete issue that struck me straightaway. I was struck when Ms O'Shea said that the relationship between the mothers and the children was poor. The work that Barnardos has done has brought awareness to that and helped. We are talking about intergenerational impacts. It is hugely positive and something we should act on straightaway.
I know Mr. McDonagh and the work he does. I say "Well done" and congratulate him on his appointment.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I wish him the best into the future. He talked about going back to prison to deliver training and so on, which is a great idea. I have seen this in action. It is amusing when you see people role-playing like that but it is extremely effective and impactful. It works. What is Mr. McDonagh's request of the Government? I ask him the same question I asked Ms Carroll.
Mr. Chris McDonagh:
We have put in a tender for three more full-time workers or one full-time worker and four part-time workers. I would love two or three of those staff members to be ex-prisoners. I understand they might not be able to come in. We are looking for funding for three staff. To do all 12 prisons, we would need three full-time workers.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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That makes sense. That is something else we could do straightaway. We can try to make that happen and go for it.
Ms Anne Costello:
The issue is that the current funding comes from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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It would make a massive different if that were done.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I have seen the work that the Traveller Mediation Service does. I have been there and seen it, and it is so impressive.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Other issues that have come up include discrimination and racist language, a robust complaints system, stigma and so on. The role of the Inspector of Prisons also arose. A bit of work is required but it could be done pretty soon. The director of prisons is next door at the moment at another meeting dealing with drugs. I attended that meeting before I came here. I think she would be amenable to that. Have the witnesses had an interaction with the director of prisons and the prison service?
Ms Anne Costello:
We have raised the issue but there has not been a commitment. What we need is from the top down. Prisons are very hierarchical institutions and take instructions from the top down. Ms Sweeney and I did some recent training and there is a level of hostility and an ingrained prejudice against Travellers. There is a sense that all your problems are caused because you are a Traveller. That is how some prison officers see it. If you stop being a Traveller, you could be okay. There is a need for training in that regard. It is like campaigns about drink-driving or the use of seatbelts. Some people will never understand the value of seatbelts but with the promise of three penalty points, they will wear their seatbelts. Perhaps we will not change their attitudes but we can change their behaviour. In a hierarchical organisation, if the director general and governors say certain behaviours will not be tolerated, they will change.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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From my interaction with them in the past, I am sure that is something to which they would be amenable.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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As a committee, we could engage with them straightaway and make that point. From my dealings with them in the past, I am sure they would be proactive in that regard.
Ms Saoirse Brady:
I thank the Deputy for the question. I will come in on a couple of the points. There are a couple of opportunities here. We are know we are in the last months of this Government's term but there was a commitment in the programme for Government to ratify the optional protocol to the convention against torture. The legislation to pave the way to do that has been introduced. It was published in August 2022. I presented before the Joint Committee on Justice in October of that year. The committee published its report in March 2023. The legislation in question is the inspection of places of detention Bill and it has not moved since. The Bill would really help.
We also have the Irish Prison Service Bill, which I mentioned during my presentation. One of the criticisms we have of the legislation is that a culture committee is not named. Only the heads of the Bill have been published so there is still a lot of opportunity for change. We think the cultural piece is key to addressing many of the issues in prisons, not only for Travellers but right across the board.
The review of the prison rules has been ongoing since 2019. We know that work has been done in that regard. There was a commitment to prioritising the complaints process. Nobody has faith in the current complaints process. Nobody will make complaints because they are afraid of what might happen to them.
Even if they did, they do not see redress or an outcome. Even the Irish Prison Service has been critical of the complaints process. We know that the Office of the Inspector of Prisons, the Irish Prison Service and the Office of the Ombudsman have discussed putting in place a more robust complaints system. We had a conference recently around "know your rights in prison". Ciara O'Connell was there, who I think just finished as a senior inspector with the Office of the Inspector of Prisons. She spoke about the importance of having an independent, robust complaints system. She also spoke about how those three bodies have come together and put proposals to the Department of Justice on what the complaints system might look like. We need to prioritise this and get it done sooner rather than later.
If the committee is going to write to the Department of Justice about Barnardos, we did research published last year. It was a scoping study on maternal imprisonment. It also examined Traveller mothers in prison and found that Traveller women in prison were more likely to be mothers, to be mothers at a younger age, to have more children and their children, unfortunately, were more likely to be in care. We have that evidence and can send it to the committee if that would be helpful to bolster support for that ask.
David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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It would be better if a complaints system was not needed at all and if we got in at an earlier stage. I am always fearful of a complaints process because there is confrontation and complaints. It would be good not to have the need for it but I recognise it is important. My focus would be to go before that and change the culture, as was said. It also strikes me that Travellers, in my experience, are people who had a nomadic background and like to be free. There is a contradiction in locking a Traveller up, in many ways. We must also remember that people are in prison because they committed a crime and there are victims of crime on the other side. We must never forget that. Often, Travellers themselves are also victims of circumstances, as had been articulated. Unfortunately, I have to go to another event.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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Thank you, Deputy. To be clear, before the Deputy leaves, for the agreement of members of the committee, we will write to the Department of Justice about funding the three extra staff members for Barnardos. We will also write to encourage the Department to financially support the Traveller Mediation Service. We will also write to the Department of children. Is that agreed? Agreed. I call Deputy Mitchell and then Senator O'Hara.
Denise Mitchell (Dublin Bay North, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome the witnesses. I have had the honour of being in the company of some mighty women in our visits to prisons. From what the witnesses said, there is one worker in Barnardos who is part-time and there is a massive service. Will the witnesses talk us through the supports available to someone in pre-sentencing who came to Barnardos? How is Barnardos managing? What are the hours for the demand on the service?
Ms Heather O'Shea:
The project worker role is 30 hours at the moment, four days a week. We are recruiting for the practical part-time family support worker, which is a two-day post. When we set up the service, we focused on women in prison. That is where the bulk of our work has been to date. We have started stretching back to pre-sentencing and building relationships in the community. We focused on areas with a high population of Traveller families in Dublin north. I have met probation services, local community services and schools to build up the referral process there. We are limited in what we can do because the bulk of our work is in prisons at the moment.
The pre-sentencing piece is slower because all of our resources are going into prisons. The hope is that the pre-sentencing piece will be for women attending court and if the next step is prison, that we can provide intensive family support not only to the mother but the children outside. Huge changes will take place, particularly regarding who will care for the children. If the children go into the care of a grandmother or the care system, it is consistency and a familiar face. That is the main piece, for me, for the child and mam to know I meet her on Tuesday but on Wednesday I will see her children out in the community. It is to have consistency between the two. It is also about advocating for these women and the children in regard to care such as care decisions and who will care for the children. If they will go into maternal or paternal care, it is to provide that support too. Perhaps granny has not cared for a younger child in 20 years and now she is caring for a six-year-old. It is about how we can support granny for that transition for the child to be cared for.
Denise Mitchell (Dublin Bay North, Sinn Fein)
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Ms Sweeney said something that struck me and I am still trying to get my head around it. It was about the one-minute call someone gets with their child. They are worried about their child; they need to reassure their child that they are okay and they need to know their child is okay. Will Ms Sweeney comment on that?
Ms Ann Marie Sweeney:
Even having that relationship when you are in prison, knowing the work Barnardos does, you can then focus on yourself. Sometimes, you have not seen your child in a while, you do not know how big the child has become or how they speak. You do not really know what is going on in their life and then you have that opportunity with Barnardos to have that kind of relationship. Then, you start to say to yourself, "Maybe I can do it, maybe I need to change and maybe now I can start looking at myself because now I can see this little individual in front of me or on this phone and they need their mummy". It gives extra hope to the women in prison to better their lives or seek out our services. It is a great opportunity.
Denise Mitchell (Dublin Bay North, Sinn Fein)
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That is it in a nutshell.
Ms Anne Costello:
Another important role for Barnardos is if it is that intermediary because sometimes Traveller mothers and, I think, all mothers going into prison have a huge fear of Tusla coming and taking their children. An organisation like Barnardos is that intermediary - someone they can trust. It can then negotiate the relationship with Tusla or whatever. That makes a huge difference.
Ms Clodagh Carroll:
There is something about supporting Traveller mothers to understand their identity as mothers and understand that they have a right to know where their children are, and to have meaningful contact with them. We have learned to support the mothers to have that contact with their children, which at the moment in the Prison Service is very short. We hope to look at a more relationship-based, trauma-informed piece in that regard. It is about meaningful contact with their children even though they are not the primary carer of their child.
Ms Ann Marie Sweeney:
A lot of Traveller women who go to prison have more than one or two kids. A six-minute phone call does not cut it. I had six kids when I went to prison. Each day, I had to have a phone call to each child. I would not get to talk to one child for a whole other week. It should be extended. It is important that you have that time with each child and not just cut them off and start rushing them after six minutes because you know the phone call will end. It is not nice. That could do with being changed.
Ms Heather O'Shea:
On that, we have been providing support to a mam and her child over phone contact. The child was telling mammy about what was going on, that she needed support with this and that and then it reached the six-minute mark. Fortunately, where we doing the phone call, I was able to run out and ask for two more minutes but the difference was that phone call would have just been cut. The child would have been so distressed due to what she was talking about and mam would have been equally distressed, going off and being isolated, whereas we got the two extra minutes and were able to wrap it up nicely. The following phone call was not distressing for either mam or child. My fear is that either mam or child would avoid the next phone call because it was so distressing and upsetting, whereas the child still felt they were heard and supported by mam. We could wrap it up in a nice way so mam felt she was a mammy and the child felt mammy was there for her, which is huge.
Ms Saoirse Brady:
Some other things are relevant to this, one of which is Tusla, which Barnardos mentioned. In the Irish Penal Reform Trust, we have a children and families initiative. It was kind of what started the conversation between Barnardos and the Traveller Justice Initiative. A reason we have that project is to focus on children impacted by family imprisonment and parental imprisonment in particular. We have an estimate of how many children are impacted; we think it is 6,000 at any given time but it could be up to 10,000. Thankfully, in Young Ireland, the new national policy framework for children and young people, for the first time, those children are named as a cohort. Three actions are aligned to them, one of which is to collect the data. I am talking about data again but it is important. We cannot develop proper services unless we know who we are dealing with. A lot of those children are invisible. We have been talking about them in terms of the child poverty conversation. When someone goes to prison and their partner is left behind to mind the family, they are then lone parents but they may not be entitled to a payment for six months, for example. Tusla does not know how many children it is dealing with in care who have a parent in prison.
We would love for it to keep that data. The other thing we would love for it to do concerns toolkits which have been developed by Sarah Beresford of Prison Reform Trust in the UK. It is around a child-rights impact assessment for children going to prison. She has two different toolkits, one for when a mother goes to prison and one for when a father goes to prison. She developed those with young people. Those toolkits could be adapted in Ireland. We have been talking to Tusla about this to try to get it to take this up. It would be particularly powerful. The children with whom Sarah Beresford worked said that when their parents go to prison, they are asked at the very beginning whether they want contact with them. Sometimes, the children are so angry, upset or frustrated by what has happened that they say "No". They are not asked again. Relationships then need to be rebuilt and developed. That is one side of things.
Another thing to note – and this is a positive development – is that, for the first time ever, the Irish Prison Service has recently recruited a family connections officer. Since 1 July, Marita Costigan has started as a family connections officer employed by the Irish Prison Service. She is the only person for the whole prison estate, however.
Another action in the Young Ireland policy is to develop a visiting policy. We talked about the six-minute phone calls earlier. We also have to think about the limited access to family visits, the fact that people have to travel across the country taking their children out of school, because visiting hours are not family friendly, and the cost of all of that on people. We were recently contacted by a Traveller woman who told us about her partner who was placed in a prison on the other side of the country. As she did not drive, she had to get a bus. When she got to where the bus left her off, she still had to get a taxi, which cost more than €200 return. Her husband was then transferred to a Dublin-based prison, believing that would be easier. When she arrived in Dublin with her four children, one of whom has additional needs, she had to cut the prison visit short after four hours of travelling because that child became so distressed and apparently disturbed other people’s visits. We are talking about children going through prison security. That can be distressing for any one of us, never mind for a non-verbal child. While we understand the pressure on the prison system and the impact it might have on others, we need to be more creative.
We carried out a survey with our members in prison, one of whom – and we sought permission to speak about the issues he raised – said the Irish Prison Service accommodates his child with additional needs coming into the prison, but that it is not very regular because of the pressures, unfortunately. We need to look at that piece and make visiting much more family friendly. There are opportunities here to do it, but we need to build on them. We need to properly resource the Irish Prison Service to do the family piece. It is not only good for the children, the parents and everyone involved, but it is also the golden thread to stop reoffending. There is a public policy piece in this regard we need to address.
Denise Mitchell (Dublin Bay North, Sinn Fein)
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Ms Brady mentioned Tusla. What response has she got? Has that advanced any further?
Ms Saoirse Brady:
Not so far. Tusla has attended sessions we have organised. It is certainly interested. It is very overstretched at the moment as well. We had a session with some key decision-makers with a colleague from Wales who runs an organisation called Invisible Walls in one of the prisons there. It is doing amazing things like having parent-teacher meetings in prison. Ms Costello, Ms O’Shea and a number of others were in attendance. We saw a video of the impact it can have. He is a prison officer and has been kind of accepted by the establishment, too. He talked about how he went to the local principals’ conference in Wales and asked whether they had thought about children of people and what is done to accommodate them. He asked them whether they would like to get involved in his project, to which they replied that none of the children in their schools have parents in prison. He then put up a slide with all the school uniforms his organisation sees coming through the prison doors, and every single school was on it. There is this invisibility about those children which we really need to break down and address.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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It is important we look at getting Tusla before the committee about the work it does specifically with Travellers in prison. What Ms Costello spoke about is extremely real. Ms Sweeney rightly said that having a relationship with your children is important. Many Traveller women prefer their child to be with the grandmother, sister or uncle and cut off that relationship because of the fear of Tusla. That is very real. It is maybe something we can look at.
Ms Clodagh Carroll:
Part of the work Ms O’Shea and the team have been doing with Traveller women in the prison has involved Tusla. It has been a helpful part of the process. We are supporting these mothers to be able to say what they think should happen and to be part of their meetings with Tusla. Tusla has been very receptive to that. It has been a positive collaboration with mothers and their workers. Tusla sits on the advisory board as well. It is really helpful to have that collaboration and that it is part of the work we are trying to achieve. It is helpful in that regard. It is great to be progressing, too.
Ms Heather O'Shea:
In or around 70% of the women attending the service have at least one child in the care of Tusla. We have done a huge amount in initially building a relationship with Tusla. A lot of the mothers coming through the door now are prepared for meetings. We have child protection case conferences and the mothers are coming through. They are prepared and empowered to speak for themselves. We have done bits around role-play and communication skills. With our support, the women are at a point now to advocate for themselves and their children and for their role in their children’s lives when they have a child in care.
In a way, there is an understanding of the different orders, what they mean and their rights as a mother, particularly with regard to foster care and adoptions and what that looks like. We have had quite a positive response. The women have said that they now have a more positive relationship with Tusla with regard to the care of their children. They feel a bit more heard than they did in the past.
Denise Mitchell (Dublin Bay North, Sinn Fein)
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I have one final question for Ms Costello. I am interested to hear about the positive engagement she had with the Judiciary. Have there been any follow-up actions?
Ms Anne Costello:
The President of the District Court has invited us to come back to meet with him again. At that first session with the District Court judges, they invited us to come back to meet with the Circuit Court judges and the more senior judges. We met with them in an online meeting. What has surprised us is that they do not understand what is going on in other areas. For example, there is a drugs court, but many of them did not even know about it. The drugs court is hugely supportive of people with issues in the criminal justice system. We were not aware of it either. It was Ms Sweeney who raised awareness about it among us. While there was a real lack of awareness from the judges, there was real honesty. Ms Sweeney spoke to the judges about going into court one day. I will let her explain.
Ms Ann Marie Sweeney:
Believe me, from my point of view, it was a difficult crowd and I was very nervous. With all due respect, they were respectful. I explained to them that one day when I was going into court in Dublin – I will not say which court – the solicitor pulled me aside before going in and told me that the judge did not like Travellers. I wished the ground could have opened up and swallowed me because I did not want to go into that court knowing that, even though I was prepared and willing to face the consequences. That says a lot for me. I heard the judges feedback. They have seen a lot of Travellers coming through the system on their side, but most of them have never had an opportunity to sit down and listen to Travellers. They had the opportunity to ask questions. It was a great experience all in all.
Ms Ann Marie Sweeney:
I explained to them that when I dropped the kids to school and went to court, I never came back. When I went into prison, I did not have contact with the kids to let them know. You are talking about a week later before being able to have a chat and to even know where the kids were going and who was taking them. Some of the family members were probably pushed into taking them. I know I have some responsibility in that. I knew my mother and grandmother would take them. Sometimes, that put a strain on my mother’s mental health. She was not prepared. She did not have children and did not know what to do. The family and the kids were all uprooted. Imagine if I had met someone from Barnardos before I went to prison. I did not have much support. I knew of no support. I did not know anything like that. It might have prevented a lot of things.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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Judges have to leave their children to go work and have to that explain to their children. Once a week, I explain to my children that mammy has to go to work in order that they do not feel abandoned. That is very real. To have that experience must have been absolutely traumatic for Ms Sweeney but, most importantly, for her children too. That should not be allowed to happen.
Ms Clodagh Carroll:
I would really like that to be something Barnardos could support within the pre-sentencing piece in order to support Ms Sweeney in that moment and to advocate on behalf of what her children need, as well as what Ms Sweeney needs as a mum. This is a reasonable ask. It is fair for her to need that and for her children to need it. That could then help with so many of the next phases of why a person is incarcerated, on how he or she can have a relationship with his or her children and on how the children feel when they go to sleep at night knowing what is going to happen next.
Mal O'Hara (Green Party)
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I have a couple of questions and then maybe a proposal, but first I just want to thank Ms Sweeney for sharing her personal testimony on the advocacy of that project and the supports. That was really powerful, as was everything else that was said.
I want to ask about the Traveller Mediation Service. I have a Nordie accent, so I want to ask about that support in the North. Will the witnesses talk a little bit more about that and any support they are receiving from local councils, the PSNI or the Executive in the North?
Mr. Chris McDonagh:
The mediation service is involved with the PSNI in the North. Five years ago, there was a dispute in Enniskillen. Sadly, one man lost his life. The PSNI called the Donegal Traveller Project and asked if there was any support because it had no relationship with the Traveller communities there. The Donegal Traveller Project told them to give the Traveller Mediation Service a call Within two days, my colleague Frank Kavanagh and I went up and met with the PSNI and then we met with the two families on both sides of the Border. Since then, we have worked there a great deal, especially with the sergeant in Omagh. We have had talks with them. At the moment, they are looking at putting funding together in order that we can maybe set up one or two mediators for the North who would be working for the Traveller Mediation Service. We had a meeting a couple of weeks ago in Cavan where we had members of An Garda Síochána and the PSNI attending because we have a bit of a cross-Border dispute with families. It is about how to support each other there. The PSNI is currently looking at funding to get perhaps one or two mediators for the North of Ireland.
Mal O'Hara (Green Party)
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I thank Mr. McDonagh for that. Has there been engagement with the Executive or the local council? Is it just the PSNI?
Mr. Chris McDonagh:
We have had a couple of meetings in the past few years but because we are so small, we cannot go up every couple of weeks for meetings. If something happens down here, especially on the mediation side, we have to go here first. There are only two of us operating as full-time mediators at present.
Mal O'Hara (Green Party)
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A strategic failure in the North has been the loss of An Munia Tober, an umbrella Traveller-led organisation that advocated on behalf of Travellers in the context of their needs.
With regard to standards and training, Ms Brady and Ms Costello talked about going in and delivering one-off sessions. It is something but it is not systemic and does not address prejudice and racism. Do the witnesses have any knowledge about the standards relating to training for new prison officers and probation officers in respect of to anti-discrimination, prejudice and, specifically, Travellers?
Ms Saoirse Brady:
The Irish Penal Reform Trust gets invited to training for prisoner officer recruits every six weeks or so, but it is an hour-long session and one can only say so much in that time. The Traveller Mediation Service goes in too. They do have that training as a once-off at the beginning but - please correct me if I am wrong - we must consider the culture piece in particular. For example, I have spoken to people from a policing background who said it is all very well doing something when a person is a recruit but we need to go back a year later when they have been in the system for a time, especially if there are ingrained prejudices or biases that they might pick up. Many people have retired from the Prison Service. There are a lot of new people coming in. That is good but it means they are taking on a great deal of responsibility very quickly as well. We really need to address that.
The Prison Service was one of the first bodies that signed up to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission public sector duty training when it emerged initially. It was involved in one of the first pilots. There is definitely a willingness to engage but it needs to be done regularly, it needs to be systemic and, as Ms Costello said, it needs to come from the top.
Ms Saoirse Brady:
On overcrowding, Deputy Stanton referred to people being sentenced and going to prison. The most recent annual report we have from Irish Prison Service is from 2020. This showed that 74% of committals were for sentences of 12 months or less. That particularly impacts people going in for very short sentences. We know of people who are sentenced for maybe a matter of weeks or months but because of the pressures on the system at the moment they are in there for five days. What use is that to anybody? It does not actually deter people in the future. We need to look at alternatives to custody and really invest in those. We have made a pre-budget submission. We have called for more investment in the Probation Service, in restorative justice in particular and in mental health and addiction services within prison settings. We must reduce the number of people in prisons, which is Government policy. The Review of Policy Options for Prison and Penal Reform 2022-2024 refers to reducing the number of people going in on short sentences of 12 months or less. We need to implement that and we need to take it seriously because the prison system cannot cope with the number of people that are in it. We do not need more prison spaces; we need to reduce the number of people going there in the first place.
Mal O'Hara (Green Party)
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I thank the witnesses. I also work in youth work in building strong communities and looking at poverty and inequality and all of those systemic issues that we need to address. Can I make a proposal? I appreciate that the committee will be writing a couple of letters requesting additional funding. The Traveller Justice Initiative and the Irish Penal Reform Trust will be writing jointly to the Office of the Inspector of Prisons. Would it be useful for the committee to also write and support the call for thematic inspections?
Ms Saoirse Brady:
Yes. They will certainly be alerted to this conversation anyway through their media monitoring I am sure. They will know about it. They are definitely open to it. Again, it probably comes down to resourcing. They did do a really effective thematic inspection that was published earlier this year on psychiatric care in prisons. I believe they would welcome the support of this committee for them to do that.
Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses very much for all their presentations. Sometimes committee meetings can be boring and repetitive. Listening to the witnesses, however, it is obvious that there is joined-up thinking between all the organisations and that things are moving forward.
I was interested to hear Senator O'Hara speak about thematic inspections, but that has been covered.
Ms Brady spoke about the Probation Service. On one of our visits, I spoke to a probation officer who was very outgoing and forward about what was happening. It goes back to what would be the alternatives to prison and what alternatives would be offered. Ms Brady mentioned people going in and being back out in five days, with no backup and anything else. There also seems to be a lack of support within the probation services. Has anybody looked into aftercare, for example?
There was also mention of mental health and other issues. I was a member of the autism committee, and one or two of the members will be aware that we met people from the Scottish Parliament. They had a full pathway, including wraparound services, for people suffering with mental health and autism, which we do not have here. We class it as dual diagnosis, but it is a weak policy.
The following is more of an observation. I congratulate every one of the witnesses. I know the work Ms Anne Costello does. Ms Sweeney has always been brutally honest. I love listening to the experts. They are the experts because they have the lived experience. They are the ones who have gone through the cracks and who know how to fill them. Well done to the witnesses in that regard. It is wonderful to see Barnardos come on board because this is about joined-up thinking. We often say, especially in the context of the health services, that people work in silos and are sectioned off. Then you see other communities come together, and when you pool your resources together, you will get better results. As regards Mr. McDonagh and the mediation service, that is a game-changer. It is unbelievable. I hope he has more success and I was delighted when he mentioned that it is a 32-county initiative because we are just the one island, believe it or not. I have seen that as well with the Middletown centre when it comes to autism services. It is based up in Armagh but covers the Thirty-two Counties.
It is a very positive thing we are listening to here. As I said, as a committee, it is still a great opportunity if we can assist the witnesses in anything to move things forward. I have met most of them before and I commend them on the work they are doing. The experiences we have had on the visits have been really heartwarming and, judging from the people I spoke to, it is game-changing. I remember speaking to one fella who said, "When I am out of here, I am going to have my driver licence and all my tickets." He said, "I am ready to get to work." That shows what can happen within the system if it is tweaked and improved.
I agree with one of the speakers who talked about the training and upskilling. That has to happen all the time. It has to evolve. It is about building trust but it is like everything in that it is about understanding what you are dealing with first. If you do not understand that when you are going in, you will be at a loss and there will be conflict.
I go back to Ms Sweeney's story about the effects of motherhood and children and so on and that situation where the kids were at school. That situation, regardless of what she did, is totally wrong. It is totally inhumane to do that to anybody. I would like to address that.
Was it Ms Anne Costello or Ms Brady who spoke about meeting with the Circuit Court and High Court judges and so on? That is huge as well because they are so busy that they just do not know what is going on. It is all down to sitting down together, talking about it and explaining it. In our job, we always say there is no such thing as a stupid question but the problem is that you might get a stupid answer. That is when you have to go back and ask again.
I have really enjoyed listening to the witnesses. These are all positive things that are happening, and if we can support them in any way at all, they should just ask us.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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Thank you, Deputy. Ms Brady, would you like to come in?
Ms Saoirse Brady:
I will come in on the probation piece. The Probation Service has just launched its new strategy. I was at the launch, and the service did say that staff retention is a problem overall at the moment. Probation officers are social workers. We know there is a social work shortage. The service is looking at creative ways to address that. It will launch a restorative justice strategy as well. We did call for more supports for the Probation Service. Ultimately, a prison space, according to the latest estimate we have, costs €84,000 a year. It is probably more than that now because that figure is a little old. Some €6,000 or less will get you a community service order and probation supervision. That is much more effective as regards somebody not reoffending; getting back into employment; if they have accommodation, keeping that accommodation; if they have an existing relationship with their family, maintaining that relationship; and getting any community supports they happen to be getting if that is meant to help an addiction, although many people are falling between the cracks.
The Deputy asked about supports for people. In Cloverhill there is a really good model, the prison in-reach and court liaison service. It has diverted more than two prisons' worth of people who have mental health issues from prison. One of the programme for Government commitments that has been delivered is the report of the high-level task force on mental health and addiction challenges for people who come into contact with the criminal justice system. That was published two years ago. It was published the same week as the budget and it was not costed. Again, we have asks around that in our pre-budget submission, but one of those is around a dual diagnosis lead. That was committed to. We know that the Prison Service is open to that and that it is looking at recruitment and may have already recruited for that position, but we need to ensure that this is rolled out further and that proper support is given.
Ms Sweeney's story is an illustration of what happens to so many people, so many mothers, in this country because we do not have sentencing guidelines. We do not take into account what happens in the child's best interests. They do have this in England and Wales. We do not have sentencing guidelines for anything. Particularly when it comes to children, that is something we have to do. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is developing general comments of guidance on access-to-justice issues for children outside of criminal law or the youth justice system. We have made a submission to that and we have called for guidelines to be put in place.
Ms O'Shea mentioned earlier something else about working with mothers of three unborn children. Why is a pregnant woman in prison in the first place? Does she need to be there? Is that really appropriate? We know that there are facilities there but they are very overstretched. There are 180 women in a space which has capacity for 146 women, and that had already gone up overnight from 105, so there is an issue there around pregnant women in particular. There was a court case earlier this year - it was reported in the media - involving a woman who was convicted of drug trafficking. The judge mentioned that it was a first-time offence, that he felt she had been coerced by the man she had met, that he did not think she would do it again and that she was pregnant. She was still sentenced to prison and is going to give birth there. I am delighted that Ms Costello and Ms Sweeney got to present to the judges, but we need judges to go into prisons and understand what is happening more and more.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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The absolute last resort is to put a pregnant woman in prison. Thank you, Deputy Buckley.
Over the summer, the Vice Chairperson, Deputy Ó Cuív, announced that he will not be running in the next election. As Travellers, we are very grateful for the work Deputy Ó Cuív has done for years, especially for Travellers in prison and people in prison in general. I do not want to shame you, Deputy, but it is regrettable for us that you have decided to step down. We do acknowledge all your hard work and commitment to Travellers over the years. I am sure we will get time to discuss that again in the future, especially the matter of Travellers in prison. Over to you, Deputy. No pressure.
Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Cathaoirleach. I was at a social welfare committee meeting before I came in here. That is why I was delayed.
Many issues have been covered. The key issue has just been touched on again, and that is why all these people are in prison and whether prison is something we inherited and just continue or whether it is actually delivering what it is meant to deliver. As far as I am concerned, there are reasons why one might take people out of society. One is for the safety of society. If, however, we are talking about prisoners going in for six or nine months, unless they came out totally different people, that does not achieve any result. If we are talking about rehabilitation, is prison the best model? I doubt it. Does it have the resources? I doubt it.
If I may move on specifically to women prisoners, a lot of the issues have been raised today, including children, pregnancy and so on.
However, it is also true to say that an awful lot of women prisoners are in for very short terms. Many of them are in because of addiction-related issues. As I have argued all along, should they not be sent to somewhere that would focus on rehabilitation and not incarcerated where the whole focus would be on maintaining links where there are good family links and building family links where they are not so good?
Judges have a role to play but they do not have the role to play. Policy has the role to play, in my view. Without spending years doing investigations and so on, we need to look at matters very simply. Most complicated issues can be broken into simple steps. Look at the cohort of female prisoners. Would they have been better served – which is the most important thing – had there been an alternative and, particularly in cases of addiction, where addiction services were provided in a supportive atmosphere, whether residential or day care? And would society ultimately be better served too? Because the good of the individual should also be the good of society if you are helping people to move on with their lives.
Have the witnesses any suggestions on the kind of work we can do on this issue? I think Ms Brady said there are 180 in the Dóchas Centre which has 140 places. That is at a stretch. It is a very small site and a high-wall facility. It is a big difference from home. I wonder how many of those women, it could be 110 or 120, pose no immediate threat to society. There will probably be a fair number in for shoplifting and things like that. They are not violent crimes but passive crimes.
Then on the men’s side, if we look at it numerically, men's prisons has the greatest overcrowding problem. There are just a lot more male prisoners. There is a high percentage of Travellers in the prison system but there seems to be a higher percentage in some prisons rather than others. In terms of Travellers in prison, because it seems that Galway people are sent there, I am most familiar with Castlerea. Have we statistics? We know recidivism is high. It is much higher for things like burglary and theft and for short sentences than long sentences. We also know that stable relationships and age reduce recidivism so when people get to their mid-40s it tends to drop. Are we doing enough to look at the causes of recidivism? What can we do between the time someone is apprehended for a crime until the time that person comes out of prison to try to make sure that the time they are out is not an interlude before they are back in again? How are we using the time? Should there be alternatives to prison, particularly in relation to addiction issues?
I understand that a very high number of prisoners have mental health issues. I know of prisoners who have been waiting for months to get referrals to whatever the new name is for the Central Mental Hospital - we will call it Portrane. That should not be happening. If people need medical care they should be getting medical care and not prison care. How good are the mental health supports in prison? These are the kinds of issues. For the reasons I have given, I do not think prison is delivering on the societal or the personal good. My big thing is how we can work together to avoid that.
That brings us back to two things. The mediation issue is massive. I am thinking of where there are feuds and disputes within communities. In the case of Galway, those disputes were going on for a long time and nothing was happening and action was taken when they moved down the town and then quick action was taken. It could have been nipped in the bud, in my view, a lot earlier. I think we have to question that. Is it that for as long as a situation is contained in certain communities, people just do not want to know and it is only when it spills into wider society that there is a big effort to deal with the issues? I am concerned about that too.
What I heard since I came in would be very useful, and I will not rehash that, but we do need to look at this through a very wide lens and provide better services for those who have to go into prison because there is no other alternative that anyone has created. Part of how we do that is to have fewer people in there and more people using alternatives.
Ms Saoirse Brady:
I feel as though I am hogging it but I will come in. There are a couple of things we could do. I think Deputy Ó Cuív has just read out our pre-budget submission, to be honest. We have called for a bail supervision scheme for women as a pilot scheme. We have costed it at around €300,000. This works really effectively in the youth justice system. Multidisciplinary teams are brought in that work with the young person and family. It has such benefits for everyone. I know the Deputy was at the briefing in the audiovisual room when someone from Extern presented on that. That is a small cost. We think if it could be tried as a pilot project for women first and then extended out to 18 to 24-year-olds, that could be something really practical. It has been proven to work in Scotland and other places so there is evidence to support that.
Where people are in for short sentences, those are really for survival crimes. We are seeing more people coming into prison from homelessness and out again into homelessness. We need to address that piece. There was a criminal justice aspect to Housing First. It has been mainstreamed. Again, our pre-budget submission looked at how to use the evaluation of the Housing First for criminal justice to ensure that more people are supported when they leave prison because we have heard from women that they walk out the gate of the Dóchas Centre with all their belongings in a plastic bag and they feel as though everyone knows where they have come from. They look left or right and they do not know where to turn. They are going to emergency accommodation for the night. There is an issue there around overcrowding overall, and particularly in the men’s prisons, although the women’s seem more overcrowded more regularly. However, the Minister for Justice gave a recent figure of 245 people sleeping on mattresses on the floor. That is in a cell they are sharing with somebody else with a toilet that they all have to use. These are degrading conditions that people are in. One way we could look at reducing overcrowding is not only tackling short sentences but also the number on remand and pretrial detention. Currently it roughly one in five are in pretrial detention. We do no know why that is. The Courts Service cannot tell us why that is either from its data. We do not know if that is because of the affordability of bail. Yes, some people will need to be remanded into custody because they post a flight risk or they may reoffend or intimidate witnesses but I do not imagine that is nearly 1,000 people.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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Deputy Ó Cuív met a man in Castlerea who said he has been a long time on remand.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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Are Travellers kept longer on remand than people from the general population?
Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Following on from that, I put in a parliamentary question. Over two years, there are 20-odd, but without knowing the circumstances, you cannot really give a judgment when the numbers get that small. Because of other work I do with prisoners, one of the other things I was interested in was how that compared to remands and bails in the North of Ireland, where bail conditions can be very strict. It actually compares favourably. It would be interesting to get the figures across Scotland, Wales and England as well. I agree that people have a right to have their hearings within a reasonable time. We would have to check that in some cases the delay is not on the defence side, looking for more time, and that they are not adjourning the case. It is tricky until all the information has been obtained.
Ms Anne Costello:
To add to that, Dr. Sinead O'Malley did some research on mothers in prison in the Dóchas Centre in Mountjoy. From this, she extracted the information on Traveller women. She found much higher levels of mental health and addiction issues, all linked to trauma, among this group. The percentage of women in the Barnardos group that was homeless was nearly 80%. Can Ms O'Shea confirm that is correct?
Ms Heather O'Shea:
Yes. The difficulty is trying to find the resources to support the women and their families on their release from prison. This can also delay the children returning to their care. It has such an impact. At the moment, we are working to ensure that children are ready to return to their mother's care but, unfortunately, it often cannot happen because the accommodation is not available or it is not suitable for the children. We are working on this in collaboration with other agencies to try to see if we can come up with something to reduce or remove that barrier.
Ms Anne Costello:
As Ms Brady said, for anyone coming out of prison to homelessness, it is very hard. If a person has mental health and addiction issues and they are homeless as well, they may possibly be robbed on the streets. To survive, many people in this situation, in turn, rob other people. Some of these people are the most vulnerable in society and very recognisable. They are easy to arrest and return back to prison.
Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Yes, that is a problem.
Ms Anne Costello:
Generally, it is the weakest who are re-imprisoned like that. The Probation Service is now very interested in the fact that if a woman comes seeking support it can identify Barnardos as a possible community option. Before that they could not say with any degree of certainty that a woman would not reoffend, because there were no supports in the community. Now, it is a little bit more hopeful for women, but we need the funding to extend the service to all the men in prison as well.
Mr. Chris McDonagh:
For the Traveller Mediation Service, with some of the judges but mainly the inspectors and superintendents in An Garda Síochána, when there is a dispute or a feud going on, many of the judges or gardaí recommend mediation. That will stop the men going to jail for a couple of weeks or months. The mediation is to support the families and to stop the dispute. If these men are put into jail for a couple of weeks or longer, it just keeps it going. For many of the issues that come before the courts that entail a short sentence, judges and the Garda recommend mediation as a first step. That is with the support of the superintendents and the inspectors.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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This shows the level of funding needed from the Department of Justice.
Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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A figure of €300,000 was mentioned earlier for a programme. If the approach we take is that we have to build another 40 places for female prisoners and then another 40 and so on, it will cost a fortune to provide a solution that is actually the problem, not the solution.
Ms Saoirse Brady:
If we look at Limerick Prison, it is trauma-informed, new, shiny and state of the art. It was built to double up, and what happened? It doubled up within a month or two of officially opening. The more prison spaces we create, the more we will fill. We really need to think about this. At the audiovisual room briefing the Deputy attended, we talked about small-scale detention. This is about looking at other options to big, Victorian-style prisons. We really need to look at that more and reimagine the criminal justice system. That is something the IPRT would really like to see.
Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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As an aside, during the 1990s, I used to visit republican prisoners in prisons in England. I would often engage with the governors about things outside of the immediate issue I was there for. They told me that longer sentences were not producing better results and there were more people in prison. They had the exact same syndrome going on with more people in prison and longer sentences. The prison authorities themselves, that is, the governors, saw that it was not working. We seem to have got into this vortex here at the moment that more prison spaces are the answer, rather than analysing all the people who are in prison and asking why they are there.
The Dóchas Centre has been identified as the most overcrowded. The issue there is probably the easiest to solve as well and would have the least resistance from the public if it were solved.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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I have some questions that perhaps cannot be answered today because we are due to finish at 12.30 p.m. For us as a committee, it is not just about visiting halting sites and not taking any action. It is not just about going into the prisons and seeing the men and women and leaving it there. It has really opened up my eyes. In Castlerea Prison, Ms Costello said that we are not looking for more prisons; we are looking for more support to help people stay out of prison. She also spoke about indigenous people all over the world being more likely to end up in prison than the general population, in their own countries.
Reference was made to the ethnic identifier in prisons and I think that is important information for us to have. From my visits, I know that in one prison, Travellers made up more than 30% of the male inmates. Behind that statistic is a large number of men taken away from their families. I understand that many people are in prison for valid reasons but some people are in prison for doing things that they needed to do to survive, as Ms Sweeney mentioned, when she talked about needing to feed her children. This is the human side of the issue.
When visiting the prisons, we spoke about the fact that attacking the Prison Service was not the purpose of the committee. The purpose is to come up with solutions and to see what we can do collectively to make life easier for the people working on the outside and most importantly, for the prisoners themselves. I will email the list of questions I have. They are about the ethnic identifiers and how to reduce reoffending rates in the Traveller community.
On the issue of homelessness, yesterday we were working on the planning and development legislation in the Seanad. While I was seeking to have the Traveller community named in the Bill, the Ministers responded by stating that was up to the Traveller accommodation programme, TAP. Unfortunately, in my time in Leinster House, I have not seen the political will to make life more bearable for members of the Traveller community. I learned this during the planning and development legislation when the Minister continually refused to mention Travellers in the legislation. People with disabilities and prisoners did not even get a look-in.
Again, I think we have a lot to work on with as a society. I refer to the work of the Traveller Justice Initiative, the Irish Prison Reform Trust and Barnardos. For me, the Traveller Mediation Service is something we need not just in our prison system but also in society in general. I could not say how many times I have rung Chris McDonagh of the Traveller Mediation Service for politicians, for TDs and for local county councillors. Garda superintendents have also contacted me. If I have learned anything in the past four and half years, it is the importance of having the Traveller Mediation Service on the ground. We will do what we can to support it. It is not just about visiting and getting the lovely food the prisoners cooked for us in Castlerea Prison. It was such a lovely experience for us as a committee. Again, though, there is so much we have to do as a committee.
I thank all the witnesses for coming in. I do not know if someone would like to share something before we wrap up. There is a minute to do so if they think there is anything important that should be shared.
Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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I thank Ms Sweeney and everyone else so much.
We will go back to being a little bit formal again. Would any members of the committee like to raise any other matters? No. We will meet again next Thursday, 3 October 2024, at 10.30 a.m., when we will have representatives with us from the Irish Travellers' Access to Justice Project, so the work continues. On 10 October 2024, then, at 10 a.m., we will be meeting the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Michael O'Flaherty, to discuss Travellers and human rights at a European level. Again, though, we have legislation going through these Houses that is not future-proofed or sustainable-proofed for members of the Traveller community, so there is a lot of work to be done.