THE INTRODUCTION of airport-style security measures at prisons throughout the State is to begin tomorrow.
Prisoners, visitors and staff will all have to undergo searches on entering the Midlands Prison in Portlaoise, and everybody entering the nine closed prisons in the State will have to proceed through X-ray scanners and metal detectors by the end of September.
Each of these prisons has been given six dedicated staff who will be assigned to the security screening unit to try to stop the smuggling of drugs, mobile phones and weapons into jails.
The Prison Officers' Association annual conference in Kilkenny was also told yesterday that operational support units, which have been set up to combat organised criminal activities in jail, will be fully operational by June 21st.
The training of 31 prison officers to handle sniffer dogs will also begin next month. It is expected that sniffer dogs will be introduced in prisons on a full-time basis from the middle of July.
In total, 160 prison service staff will be assigned to the three units which were first proposed by the Government two years ago to deal with the huge amount of drugs and other contraband being smuggled into Irish prisons.
Prisoners have tested positive for drugs 40,000 times in the past three years, according to figures obtained by The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act.
Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan said stopping gangland activities from within prison was a key priority.
"We are taking a whole range of measures to secure the prisons, and that's very important if you want to take on the gang culture."
The governor of Mountjoy, John Lonergan, has announced that everybody entering the prison will have to pass the sniffer dogs.
It follows the arrest of a community drugs counsellor on suspicion of passing drugs to an inmate earlier this week. The man is still being questioned at Store Street Garda station.
Irish Prison Service director-general Brian Purcell said the person had been given local clearance as a bona-fide drugs counsellor, but the system was not perfect.
"The difficulty with people who are engaged in addiction counselling is that in order to get people who know what they are talking about and that prisoners can relate more clearly to, quite often the people involved has had experience of the drugs world and that's an ongoing issue.
"I think it is a question of balancing the risk with the benefits."