Prison service sick leave falls as overtime deal saves €30m

SICK LEAVE in the prison service fell by over 17 per cent overall in 2007, but leave taken by officers in the Prison Service Escort Corps increased by almost 50 per cent, according to figures released to the Public Accounts Committee yesterday.

Seán Aylward, director-general at the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, said that the new annualised hours deal introduced in the prison service in late 2005 was beginning to improve sick leave figures.

Under the deal, the 3,153 prison officers are paid for 360 hours overtime annually, at 1.8 times the normal rate, regardless of whether or not they work those hours.

In return, when an officer goes sick, another officer covers without extra pay. The deal was introduced to tackle high levels of sick leave.

Sick leave taken in St Patrick's Institution in Dublin dropped by more than 42 per cent between 2006 and 2007. At Cloverhill, also in Dublin, the drop was just over 41 per cent. In Dochas, the centre for female prisoners in Mountjoy, the drop was only 3.6 per cent, and Beladd House, in Portlaoise, had seen an increase of over 56 per cent. Four of the five Prison Service Escort Corps also showed an increase, with leave in the midlands corps up by 134.41 per cent.

Addressing criticism by Labour's Róisín Shortall that improvements in the rate of sick leave had not reached the target of 33 per cent, Mr Aylward said it was moving in the right direction.

"We had one of the most bitter industrial relations struggles the Department of Justice ever encountered," he said. An increase in sick days taken between 2002 and 2006 "was a side-effect of a very bitter struggle", he added.

Brian Purcell, current director-general of the Irish Prison Service, said that as a result of the deal an annual saving of €30 million was being made. Overtime of one million hours a year had been removed from the system, he said.

He explained that the sick leave figures for Beladd House were distorted because of the small number of staff there, and the figures in Dochas could be explained by the high number of female officers who became pregnant.

Mr Aylward told the committee that the Government was considering a new road traffic Bill and there were discussions about linking traffic fines to car taxation, with those who did not pay their fines not being allowed to tax their cars. He said that a pilot project to block signals to mobile phones in the midlands prison had proved successful so far.

No prison system anywhere in Europe had managed to do it so far, but the midlands pilot was showing dividends, he said.