Helen McEntee and Caron McCaffrey

The Irish Prison Service (IPS) yesterday published its annual report for 2021 as justice minister Helen McEntee visited Limerick Prison to review its major expansion project, which is nearing completion.

The overall daily average number of prisoners in custody in 2021 was 3,792, down slightly on 3,824 in 2020 — but the figures have increased in 2022 and the number of people in custody stood at 4,168 at the start of this week.

The latest data on imprisonment shows that the women’s prison at Limerick was the most crowded in the State, currently operating at 125 per cent capacity.

The government says the opening of new male accommodation in Limerick in late 2022 will result in an additional 90 prisoner cell spaces being available and the completion of a new stand-alone female prison will provide accommodation for a minimum of 22 additional prisoners.

Mrs McEntee was accompanied by Caron McCaffrey, director general of the prison service, during her visit to Limerick.

“These works are clear evidence of the government’s continued investment in the capital development of the prison estate to ensure we have adequate capacity in our prisons,” the minister said.

“I am hugely impressed by the new facility here in Limerick Prison which demonstrates the Irish Prison Service’s commitment to the provision of safe and secure custody in facilities that are designed to support prisoner rehabilitation.”

She added: “It is important that our prisons cater for the specific needs of women. This new facility has been carefully designed to meet these needs and will help the women prisoners there to address the factors that led to their offending and provide them with opportunities for a better life post imprisonment.”

The justice minister said pandemic-era policies had kept prison numbers at a “manageable level” in 2020 and 2021, but there has now been “a sustained increase in prisoner numbers being experienced across the system”.

She said: “We are expanding capacity, not just here in Limerick but also with the additional spaces that have already been provided by the reopening of the training unit in Mountjoy Prison as a facility for older prisoners earlier this summer.”

However, Saoirse Brady, executive director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT), said “welcome shifts in the use of imprisonment” in 2020 and 2021 were now being reversed. “We risk returning to a point where rehabilitative services cannot be delivered effectively in prisons, which undermines one of the core purposes of imprisonment,” she said.

Ms Brady added: “There continues to be an over-reliance on imprisonment for people convicted of less serious offences, despite its damaging social and economic impact on individuals, families, and communities. We are also seeing a very high rate of people detained on remand when we question if this is always necessary.”

She noted: “While we recognise the need for additional prison spaces — as announced today — as one part of the response to tackling overcrowding and ensuring that people do not have to share cells, without reducing the number of people sent to prison in the first place, the government risks addressing the symptoms of a broken penal system, rather than its causes.”