The Labour Party are opposed to this Bill on several important grounds of principle. In the Dáil the Labour Party tabled a motion declining to give the Bill a Second Reading in the following terms:
Dáil Éireann declines to give a Second Reading to the Prisons Bill, 1980 on the grounds that:
(a) The continuing existence of the Curragh Military Detention Centre, in which civilian prisoners are subject to military control, is unnecessary and inappropriate; and
(b) a form of custody originally designed as a short-term expedient should not be allowed to continue in existence after the factors which brought about its establishment have ceased to operate.
On behalf of the Labour group I will begin by explaining, perhaps in a little detail, what the fundamental point of principle is. The Labour Party find it unacceptable that civilians be held in military custody, because it undermines the whole development in approach to penology and development of the prison system and of the prison service. I will refer to some international minimum standards in that regard.
It is unacceptable because it does not exist anywhere else in the free common law world. I accept that there are problems and disruption in the prison system, and difficulties, and I am quite prepared to accept that there are very complex difficulties in the prison system and I am not trying in any way to undermine them. Why are we unique in this part of Ireland? Let us remember that there is not military custody in Northern Ireland and if there was we would be very eloquent and very free in our criticisms of the military state and the military connotations that that implied, and the overlap between the prison service and the defence forces in Northern Ireland. I am sure we would be very quick to criticise the possibility of civilians being held in military custody in Northern Ireland.
It does not exist in other countries where there are serious problems. It does not exist in the United States where there have been very serious prison riots and at times extremely serious problems arising from racial tensions which we do not have to cope with in this country. It does not exist in Australia or New Zealand, where again there have been serious difficulties in the prison system. They would not accept the principle of holding civilians in military custody.
We, as fairly often happens in this country, drifted into it on an ad hoc basis. There was justification to a certain extent in May 1972 when there was a major riot and disturbance in Mountjoy Prison and the need to transfer 180 prisoners. At that time a number of Members of both Houses asked searching questions to ensure that this would not be used to create a permanent acceptability of military custody. We got certain assurances at the time, and indeed it was pointed out that the Act would only last for a period of two years.
Of course it is always open to a Government to introduce a further Bill extending it, as was done in 1974, and then a further extension for another three years in 1977. Now we are being asked to extend the Act for another three years. It is important to state at this stage that it has not been the responsibility of any single Government. One of the grave worries and concerns about this subject is that it appears to be an unconsidered, unplanned, evolving situation where for administrative convenience and for punishment of individuals who are disruptive in the prison service—this is an extremely important point of principle—we have tolerated the notion of civilians being held in military custody. What we have not had is a Bill introduced into the Oireachtas setting out the planned objective in this regard. It happened initially in a rushed manner to cope with a particular factual situation of grave urgency at the time. It went through both Houses very quickly for that reason because it was realised that this was an urgent situation. But it has been renewed twice and is coming up for a third renewal.
The grounds have shifted a little. The Minister in his introduction, in his reasons given for the maintenance of military custody at the Curragh, has shifted the grounds somewhat from the original grounds for opening the Curragh to hold civilian prisoners. Part of that justification has been the development in Portlaoise. I want to dwell on some of the language, in particular that very loose term "subversive" that the Minister used in relation to Portlaoise. I believe that when a Minister for Justice uses a word, if it has no meaning of a specific sort, he should explain what he means by using it. The word "subversive" has not a defined meaning. I would appreciate if in his reply to this debate the Minister would define precisely what he means by "subversive", because it is extremely important that we know what the Minister means when he uses that word. It has not a dictionary definition in this context, and in my view it is not an acceptable word to use in these circumstances.
The development in Portlaoise to a considerable extent has been used to justify the further existence of the Military Detention Centre in the Curragh for the detention of civilian prisoners. The Minister can give further details on this if he wishes, but I understand that the vast majority of prisoners held in the Curragh—and this has been the case for a number of years—could not even under any vague and nebulous definition be regarded as what I believe is the Minister's use of the word "subversive".
I want to try to identify the values that we are talking about in relation to the prison service, values which are an extremely important part of good order in our society. I want to try to identify what possible reasons there could be for the unique situation in the Republic of Ireland that we are tolerating and continue to tolerate the holding of civilian prisoners in military custody. It is not on the basis of a planned policy proposal coming from the Minister or the Department of Justice. It happened on an ad hoc basis but it has been continued on shifting grounds ever since.
I believe that the military custody which exists in the Curragh and which is now coming up to eight years in existence is contrary to international standards which Ireland has adhered to and ought to be upholding within our prison service. I am referring in particular to the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and Related Recommendations, published by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, dated New York, 1977, although the minimum rules were in fact adopted in 1955. I want to refer to the note that precedes these Standard Minimum Rules. It refers to a resolution of the Economic and Social Council. It states:
By resolution 663 (c) (14) of 31 July, 1957, the Economic and Social Council approved the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and endorsed inter alia the recommendations on the selection and training of personnel for penal and correctional institutions and the recommendations on open penal and correctional institutions, as adopted by the first United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime, the Treatment of Offenders, held at Geneva in 1955.
According to this resolution Governments were invited, among other things, to give favourable consideration to the adoption and application of the Standard Minimum Rules and to take the other two groups of recommendations as fully as possible into account in their administration of penal and correctional institutions. These minimum rules set out the basic values, and indeed the basic international standards, for the conduct of prisons. The first aspect of that which I want to refer to is the question of personnel. Article 46 of the Standard Minimum Rules refers to institutional personnel and provides as follows:
46 (1) The prison administration shall provide for the careful selection of every grade of the personnel, since it is on their integrity, humanity, professional capacity and personal suitability for the work that the proper administration of the institutions depends.
(2) The prison administration shall constantly seek to awaken and maintain in the minds both of the personnel and of the public the conviction that this work is a social service of great importance, and to this end all appropriate means of informing the public should be used.
(3) To secure the foregoing ends, personnel shall be appointed on a fulltime basis as professional prison officers and have civil service status with security of tenure subject only to good conduct, efficiency and physical fitness. Salaries shall be adequate to attract and retain suitable men and women; employment benefits and conditions of service shall be favourable in view of the exacting nature of the work.
I will also quote Article 47 in this context. Article 47, paragraph 1 provides:
47 (1) The personnel shall possess an adequate standard of education and intelligence.
(2) Before entering on duty, the personnel shall be given a course of training in their general and specific duties and be required to pass theoretical and practical tests.
(3) After entering on duty and during their career, the personnel shall maintain and improve their knowledge and professional capacity by attending courses of in-service training to be organised at suitable intervals.
It goes on in considerable detail emphasising the importance of the profession of the prison service, the importance of it as a vital social service, the importance of full understanding of this in the minds of the public, in the minds of the prison personnel and in the minds of prisoners within the prison system.
How can we even begin to develop these values adequately when we have an easy interchange between our prison system and military custody, a total aberration of everything that this international standard is looking for? That cannot be over-emphasised. It is unacceptable fundamentally to have civilians in military custody. If it were to exist at all it should be in circumstances where there is an absolute breakdown of law and order in the society, of peace and security such as would involve derogations from the European Convention on Human Rights, which might be the kind of conditions which in the past gave rise to a declaration authorising internment under the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act, 1940.
I want to emphasise that there is a tendency, which is understandable, when you have something that has existed for eight years, to see military custody as more or less acceptable for hard-line cases or as a type of indirect punishment of ring-leaders or trouble makers. That is not acceptable. That would not be acceptable in other systems. That would not be acceptable among penologists. That would not be acceptable in the prison services of other jurisdictions. Let us at least acknowledge that. Let us at least admit that we have departed from minimum standards at the international level and what would be regarded as a norm in prison services in countries which have more or less the same common law principles as ourselves. I would emphasise that there are severe difficulties and problems from time to time in relation to the running of their prisons.
I would invite the Minister in his reply to this debate to answer this point: is there something uniquely difficult in the Irish situation when we have had eight years of holding civilians in military custody? Is there something so far out of line with the kind of difficulties prison services in other jurisdictions have that we depart from this fundamental principle and accept and tolerate the continuing notion of civilian prisoners being held in military custody?
I would like to make two brief observations, because neither of them is a point I feel I need to labour. I will make them lest I will be misunderstood. There are people who sometimes misunderstand when one is making a point. I am looking in a certain direction, as I speak. I will say no more.
The first point I would like to make is that I am not making any criticism of the Defence Forces in the Curragh. They are not trained prison staff, that is not their job. I join with other Senators in saying that they do the job that is cast upon them and they do it with goodwill. They do it as they respond to other jobs that our society thrusts upon them. They should not be asked to do it. I make no criticism at all of the way in which they do it. On the contrary, it is to their credit that they have been prepared to carry out a very difficult task down the years.
My first point out of the way, I hope, the second point is where there can be the possibility of being either deliberately or perhaps innocently misunderstood. I am not a front for any subversive group. I am not influenced by any subversive group in whatever way you want to define that word. From the beginning I have tried to identify the standards and the values of our society, which are deeply involved in this very sad situation of the continual renewal of the original Act which was to die within two years when it was brought in. It is one of the areas where our civil liberties are being undermined. That fabric is very thin indeed and shredded and here we ought to be extremely concerned about it.
I would like to come to an important aspect of the problem, and that is the classification of those who are to be transferred from civil prison custody to military custody at the Curragh. The Minister in his speech introducing the Bill in this House gave the same two reasons he gave in the Dáil, so at least there is absolute consistency in that. I would like the Minister in his reply to break down these two categories and tell us a great deal more about his thinking and about the representations made to him on the basis of these two categories by the prison authorities, presumably by the governors of the prisons, in inviting him to make an individual transfer of a prisoner from Mountjoy or Portlaoise or wherever it may be to the Curragh. The classifications that the Minister has given us are as follows:
Military custody which was first introduced in 1972 is still required to isolate out of the civil prisons, (a) persons requiring a high degree of security who cannot be accommodated in Portlaoise prison or elsewhere in the civil prisons system.
The Curragh itself is not a high security prison. I would like the Minister's comment on that—that it would not be regarded in its physical lay-out as a high security prison. It may result in people being held in a highly secure situation if there are about 28 of them and they are in the middle of a military barracks and there are a very considerable number of military personnel guarding them. That is a slightly different thing. But if the objective is to have a high security or segregation unit then that unit, as every other aspect of the prison service, should be operated by trained prison personnel with all the more training and all the more back-up and support and recognition of their specialisation when it is a special security or segregation unit.
The arguments about using the Curragh for this purpose do not hold up, because Portlaoise is a more secure prison than the Curragh. There has been a lack of willingness to process out of the system the use of military custody in the Curragh. It is convenient, I am sure it is marvellously convenient, for dealing with people who are disruptive and who cause problems in the prison system, but it is unacceptable to use it as a form of indirect punishment or as a threat that can be held over prisoners who are disruptive in the ordinary prison system. They must be dealt with by a code of rules, by a punishment system, inherent in that prison.
We ought to ask that the kind of classifications which exist in other countries in relation to high security units be made and that they meet the criteria for anybody being transferred and also that they be known and well acknowledged. The kind of criteria I am talking about are, for example, those that operate to my knowledge in relation to high security units in New South Wales. The classification is well known within the prison service there. It is set out and it prevents the possibility of a transfer to a high security unit, or worse still, a transfer, as here, to military custody being a form of individual punishment. It is not acceptable that a transfer to a high security unit be in the form of an individual punishment for disruptive conduct.
Those three criteria are not necessarily the only ways in which one can draw up the criteria, and the classification of the kind of person who may be transferred to a high security unit, but they are a reasonable identification of the criteria and the classification. There are three criteria in the New South Wales system. The first class are those of such high degree of danger to themselves that they cannot be accommodated in a normal prison system where they will be highly destructive of themselves. I know of one or two instances where these very sad cases have existed under our own prison system and it has given rise to a certain amount of concern about how to treat a prisoner like that. That would be the kind of person who could be classified as being somebody who could be removed to a high security or segregation unit. Secondly, somebody who has a continual and persistent record of being an escape risk, who has made persistent attempts to escape from prison and who, for that reason, on his personal record in the matter in relation to that term of imprisonment is somebody who cannot be held under the normal prison conditions but needs high security accommodation. Thirdly, under the New South Wales classification, a person who has such a record of intimidation of fellow inmates in the prison as to amount to somebody who is posing a danger or risk to other prisoners held in that prison. In other words, for the protection of other prisoners.
The reason I set out these classifications which are used in another jurisdiction in relation to a high security unit is because I do not get the impression from what the Minister has said that there are these objective classifications. I get the other impression, the impression that the military detention centre at the Curragh is used as a form of punishment for prisoners who have been involved in disruptive activities in one of the other prisons, somewhere like Mountjoy or Portlaoise. That would be unacceptable in other jurisdictions. Let us at least think about that because if the prison system at present has this kind of flexible possibility of weeding out trouble makers and carting them off to military custody, are we ever going to give up that? If we do not examine the values underlying it, if we accept it in principle, are we ever going to give it up? Even if there was a high security prison would the Minister give up this possibility of still retaining the facility to weed out trouble makers and have them held in military custody in the Curragh in conditions which do not conform to the minimum standards identified and set out at international level? This is extremely important.
Whether the House decides to approve this Bill—I hope the House will not—and we continue to have military custody in the Curragh or whether we go forward to have a high security unit which the Minister says has now commenced its preparatory stages, and moneys have been voted for it this year and more money will be allocated next year, in the grounds of Portlaoise Prison, let us go ahead with an understanding of what a secure unit within our prison system should be. We should consider the kind of classifications which should be there for any prisoners who are to be transferred to the particular high security unit. It is not acceptable that it be a form of punishment. The only punishments that are acceptable—again I refer here to the minimum rules— are those contained in the prison rules and the disciplinary structures set up within the prison.
I should like to refer to article 29 of the Standard Minimum Rules which provides:
The following shall always be determined by the law or by the regulation of the competent administrative authority:
(a) Conduct constituting a disciplinary offence;
(b) The types and duration of punishment which may be inflicted;
(c) The authority competent to impose such punishment.
It is clear what the value is there, that when people have been deprived of their personal liberty there has to be very real care taken that they know what the rules of the prison are, have a defined structure so that they cannot be either discriminated against on an individual basis, or be the subject of arbitrary treatment, or lack the basic knowledge of what kind of conduct can lead to them being disciplined. If there is a let-out on that whole system, if prison governers know that if a prisoner is causing disruption which is giving rise to breaches of the prison rules in that prison, is there not at least the temptation that there would be a tendency by prison governers to say: "Right, one more word out of you and you are off to the military barracks in the Curragh? Is this not what happens? Is this not what happens now in our prison system? This is held over the heads of prisoners. It is used as a form of punishment. Members of the House may not see anything wrong with that but I am saying that it does not conform to standards in relation to the governing of prisons in other jurisdictions with which we would like to say we had a parallel and a comparable position. We might reflect on this, because we find ourselves in a rather unique position and we should examine some of the values underlying that position.
The point, in principle, is a very basic one. It is one that is relevant to the whole perception of a prison. That is one of the areas which has not had anything like adequate public scrutiny and examination and, in particular, parliamentary scrutiny and examination. There should be an opportunity at regular intervals in this House to examine the prison system as it is operating. We are not getting that opportunity because of the lack of access to adequate information. The problem is that because of the absence of information, the absence of any idea of what the policy is in relation to our prison system, except the recent news that we are going to build some new prisons including a new women's prison—that does not seem to fit into any plan or policy but we are going to do it anyway—we need a fundamental reexamination of the purpose of a prison system in our society. We do have a very good standard to observe in that. We have the kind of values set out in the minimum rules I quoted where the emphasis is on the rehabilitation of prisoners, on the prison service as a social service, on the necessity for adequate means of education, for adequate health care and facilities and for adequate preparation of prisoners for a return to the outside world, a return to a normal life.
There is considerable room for improvement in our general prison service. Most of these values and criteria are totally absent when we have people held in military custody. I intend to refer to some reports of the visiting committee to the Curragh to show that in those reports there is a constant criticism and constant references to the inadequacies and, yet, we are renewing this legislation for a further three years.
Another aspect of the problem is the effect of continuing this military custody in the Curragh on the whole administration of our prison system and the prison service. There should not be an overlap, or a common area of jurisdiction, between the present service under the responsibility of the Minister for Justice and the Defence Forces under the responsibility of the Minister for Defence. This is blurring and bringing together two different public systems of administration. To do so is undermining the basic values of the prison service and is a very severe departure from minimum standards at international level. One of the proofs of this is the fact that although we now get rather late each year—I do not blame the Government for this because it has been a problem with successive governments—an annual report on prisons which gives some minimal information, and even a few photographs in the most recent reports, about our various prisons, reports of the visiting committee, the names of the visiting committees and when they visited the prisons and so on, the reports on the military detention centre at the Curragh are not included in the annual report on prisons. They are not included because they do not come within the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. This means that they are that little bit less accessible to the public or Members of either House. One has to make a little more effort, and when one does the report is not published in the same form or conveying the same kind of information as the reports on the prisons. Given all these problems and defects, we still have the successive reports of visiting committees. They were not referred to at all by the Minister when introducing this Bill. I do not know whether that is because they did not just occur to him or whether it is not particularly important whether the visiting committee report or not. I would have thought there might have been some attempt not just to refer, as the Minister did, to some admission or deficiencies but to go through the successive complaints made by the visiting committee and either to admit that nothing has been done or to say that something will be done, or whether he regards some of the criticism as serious or not. It is not a question of there being different criticism in different years. Some of the most important criticisms of the visiting committees have remained constant from the earlier reports to the more recent reports available.
I do have to go into great detail in commenting on, referring to and quoting from the successive reports down the years, because the Minister had the benefit of that being done in the Dáil. If one looks at the debate in the Dáil on this Bill one will see the various extracts from these reports. However, for the benefit of Members I should like to draw attention to the similar complaints made. For example in the 1976 report, submitted in early 1977 under the general heading of Labour and Employment the visiting committee stated:
The Committee wishes again to draw attention to previous reports in which it stated that the Military Detention Barracks is not at all suitable for prisoners serving long sentences. The type of prisoners admitted to the prison raises difficulties regarding the provision and maintenance of gainful labour and employment. The employment available is not sufficient and of a kind most suitable for preparing prisoners to earn their livelihood on release, nor are these facilities suitable for prisoners serving long sentences. This insufficiency is met to a degree by the revision of the art and English classes. However, there is a requirement for workshops or some such facilities. There is a lack of facilities for the rehabilitative training of prisoners in military custody. The Committee is aware that in a prison with a population of between 22 and 27 prisoners the provision of such facilities might be disproportionately costly and not get full usage.
At a later stage in the report on psychiatric treatment a very important criticism was made. That does not seem to have been picked because it appeared in later reports. Under the heading of Psychiatric Treatment, the visiting committee stated:
During the past year the committee made recommendations concerning the availability of psychiatric facilities. Prisoners who had been receiving treatment for psychiatric disorders prior to their transfer to military custody continued to require treatment subsequent to their transfer. Due to the fact that there are no psychiatric facilities in the prison, treatment is limited to medication. This situation is unsatisfactory. The committee strongly recommends that prisoners requiring psychiatric treatment should not be transferred to military custody in the future.
That report was signed by the various members of the visiting committee who include, of course, members of the different political parties, including at that time, Deputy Joe Bermingham who, subsequently, resigned from the visiting committee to the Curragh prison camp. He did so because he was not satisfied with conditions there or with continued military custody.