Technology cuts staff at Castlerea Prison

The use of palm-print readers and other new technology on doors and gates in Castlerea Prison has eliminated 20 staff jobs at a saving of £380,000 a year, the Committee of Public Accounts heard yesterday.

The director of the Prison Service, Mr Sean Aylward, said the average cost of a prisoner in Castlerea was £60,579 a year.

This was higher than elsewhere, because the prison did not have the "vast" overcrowding problem of Mountjoy, for example, but the cost would be very much higher without the new technology.

The Office of Public Works was criticised by the committee for seriously overestimating the cost of Castlerea's prison wall.

But the chairman of the Commissioners of Public Works, Mr Brian Murphy, explained that the "reference estimate" of £3.57 million was based on the cost of the wall at Wheatfield prison - the only recent comparison available.

The eventual successful tender - £1.2 million - was calculated in the light of the Department of Justice's specifications for the wall, which had not been available at the time of the original estimate.

The Secretary General of the Department of Justice, Mr Tim Dalton, told the committee the Wheatfield wall was like "the Great Wall of China", and a similar structure was unlikely to be built again.

It had been constructed to withstand "the sort of attack which we're not likely to see" and was more appropriate to a very high-security facility, he said.