Five prison officers are suspected of having smuggled drugs to inmates, the inspector of prisons, Mr Justice Dermot Kinlen, has revealed. The development will come as a major embarrassment for the prison service and Minister for Justice Michael McDowell who together have just published proposals for a drug-free regime in the prison system.
In his first ever media interview, Mr Justice Kinlen strongly criticised Mr McDowell's performance in office saying the prison service was a "total failure". "I have no doubt about it," he said.
Millions of euro were being wasted and Mr McDowell should recruit a business consultant to reform the system.
He said inmates were not being rehabilitated and the human rights of prisoners were being breached on a daily basis.
He believed Mr McDowell will abolish the office of inspector of prisons when his own term expires next year. Mr McDowell "and his mandarins" had tried to control him with rules. The independence of his office had been undermined as a result.
"He has the potential to be a visionary but he is a conservative and he runs a conservative outfit," he said of Mr McDowell's performance in Government.
Mr Justice Kinlen had publicly criticised Mr McDowell before in his inspection reports. However, his latest comments go much further.
He was unsure if the new 1,100-bed prison at Thornton Hall would work. "Maybe it will but maybe it won't, bigger isn't always better," he told reporters at the annual conference of the Prison Officers Association in Killarney, Co Kerry. On a recent visit to Cork Prison, he said he was confronted with "horrendous" conditions. In one case six inmates were eating in a cell, in which they also used a toilet.
"You urinate and defecate in the cell while the other lads are having their lunch," he said of the conditions. Parts of Cork Prison were like an "open lavatory".
At the same prison, €5 million had been spent on a "wall that seems to go nowhere". He had been told by the prison authorities that the bulk of the money had been spent on engineers' fees.
In Arbour Hill the "so-called treatment" programme for sex offenders was only run on a part-time basis.
"One psychologist spends two days a week [working on the programme] and the rest of the week attends meetings in prison service headquarters." Cost cutting was undermining the entire prison system.
During the overtime dispute, 18 workshops were closed in Mountjoy Prison leaving inmates with little to do. None of these had been reopened despite the resolution of the overtime dispute.
Some former inmates he knew of had been taught to drive in a workshop and were now working as truck drivers and leaving crime behind. But this form of rehabilitation, and learning trades, had now been lost.
Mr Justice Kinlen has strongly criticised Mr McDowell for waiting long periods to publish his inspection reports. Some had been published the day the Dáil broke for summer, meaning they were rarely debated in the chamber, he said.
He also questioned the wisdom of spending €13,000 translating each report into Irish. "I don't imagine there's much call for them."
He said the Irish prison system needed to be much more progressive.
Some inmates should be released from prison during the day to work to earn money for their families, as happens in jurisdictions such as Hong Kong and Spain.
Conjugal visits for inmates should also be introduced. An ombudsman for investigating prison complaints works in many other countries and should also be established here.
Bureaucracy in the prison system needed to be cut through. Officials were too fond of going to conferences and on fact-finding missions to countries as far as New Zealand, to which they flew first class.