Prisons and Alternative Sentencing Options: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-22 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland I welcome the Minister and thank him for his contribution. I agree with nearly everything he said and with Senator Fitzpatrick's contribution. Sending someone to prison should be a last resort. That is a view I have always held at all points - when I was a barrister prosecuting, when I was a Minister and when I was Attorney General. I still hold that view. Mark Kelly, Inspector of Prisons, has reported to the justice committee of these Houses. In February he stated that the circumstances in Cloverhill Prison were degrading conditions due to overcrowding and in Mountjoy they were so bad that they amounted, in his view, to inhuman and degrading treatment banned by the European Convention on Human Rights. I am not saying this to be critical of the Minister because he is fresh to the job but Mr. Kelly has said that unfortunately the situation is continuing to degenerate. Let us be clear about that. Overcrowding has a long history. It goes back to the circumstances investigated in the Gary Douche commission of inquiry, where a man was killed in a basement room in Mountjoy with, I think, 14 other people in it by a prisoner suffering from a psychotic condition who had been sent there from, I think, Cloverhill, on an exchange programme because he was too unruly in Cloverhill. That report was deeply critical of the decision-making process and of the then Governor of Mountjoy for allowing that situation to arise. Thornton Hall must be built. There is no way around it. I will explain why. Mountjoy Prison, which the Minister has visited, and I presume Senator Fitzpatrick has done so too, is incapable of providing a prison system which is both deterrent and rehabilitative and functions on a proper basis. It should be demolished. Towards that end, when I was Minister for justice, I acquired an extra acre where Egan's Cash and Carry was on the North Circular Road. There are 14 acres there which are prime development land to rehabilitate the North inner city. The women's prison is massively overcrowded. The situation - let us be honest - is that if somebody goes in, somebody goes out because there is literally no extra space in that institution. There have been a lot of misconceptions about Thornton Hall. When I was Minister for justice, the Government promised me €30 million to acquire a site for a prison. That was to be financed by the sale of 29 acres at Shanganagh Castle in south Dublin. We got €30 million from private developers and Dún Laoghaire county council. We applied that in a process where we advertised and sought land in north County Dublin which would be available for the process. We nearly secured an 80-acre site but unfortunately that fell through. Eventually, the advertisements led to somebody tendering 150 acres at Thornton Hall which was then zoned as agricultural land. That land at Thornton Hall was the subject of major works and a significant investment. A lot of money was put into developing the access road and carrying out works preparatory to it being used for a new prison. This is very important: it would have accommodated proper psychiatric facilities for prisoners. The Central Mental Hospital simply does not to do that at all. It is not in the business of looking at psychiatrically ill prisoners and dealing with them on a day-to-day basis. It sees itself as having a different function. In relation to where the future lies, mention was made of drugs in prison. The then Governor of Mountjoy said if there are drugs outside there will be drugs inside. That is not good enough. It was a shameful statement to make because a system like ours should have drug-free areas and mandatory testing for people who want to have a lighter regime to be in a drug-free environment. Instead of that, young people in particular, whether they do or do not have a drug habit or addiction, are shoved into a place where it is almost obligatory to take drugs. It is a shame. With the population increase, the Minister said, and I agree with him completely, that every possible way of saving people from prison has to explored, be it the drugs court or any reasonable system. At one stage I proposed, and this House enacted, a system whereby people could be fined immediately and told they could serve a sentence if they misbehaved in the following period of time. Unfortunately our Judiciary said that was unconstitutional. I was trying to create a situation where people did not simply get off scot-free but at the same time had something held over them to ensure they would behave in future. A Minister for justice at any time faces disappointments of that kind. Mountjoy Prison is a 14-acre campus. It could dramatically improve the north inner city if it was developed for housing instead of being used as a prison campus. It is not worth preserving. Whatever people say about its historic characteristics, it should be demolished. No person should be incarcerated in Mountjoy Prison. I pay tribute to successive governors there, not least Eddie Mullins, a recent governor. The inspector pays tribute to them all of recent times. They have courageously fought to improve conditions for prisoners in the pre-Dickensian conditions in that place. If the population has increased to the extent it has, we also have to bear in mind the sentences and incidence of sentencing for sexual offences, be it rape or historical sexual abuse cases, have dramatically increased. Likewise, the population of people in the criminal cohort, which is usually 25-40, has also increased. I am not making any racial or other slur of that kind, but there are conditions now in Ireland where our demography is such that we will need extra prison spaces. There is no avoiding it. It seems to me that in those circumstances, we have to get ahead with building Thornton Hall. If the Leas-Chathaoirleach will give me 20 seconds, I will make one last point about Thornton Hall. It was cancelled due to the crash. It was reinstated in 2010. It is now part of the Government’s programme to do it in 2026. Therefore, 20 years after it was agreed to do it, it is still on the drawing board but is part of official policy. The sooner we face up to the fact that it allows decent prison spaces to be built, with a variety of regimes and with football fields and things like that in it where prisoners can rehabilitate and where there is space for people not to be overcrowded, once we do that, we will bring about a very major improvement. The Irish Penal Reform Trust is right that building prisons is not the answer. I agree with the Minister that it is not the answer in itself. If we pretend, though, that we can carry on in the circumstances condemned by the Inspector of Prisons, so roundly condemned by him, that things can carry on as they are and people can be released into society who are committing very serious offences, public opinion will not stand for it. With that in view, I will make the final point that I support the building of Thornton Hall. It is not politically popular with the trendy left, but it has to be done. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-22/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:50+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-22