Mick Clifford: Worrying signs from penal system with delayed prison chaplains reports
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On March 21 last, Eamon Ó Cuív asked the Minister for Justice when exactly the prison chaplains reports for 2021 would be published.
This was the second time that the Fianna Fáil TD for Galway West asked the question in four months. In the interim, on February 8, Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy asked about the failure to publish the reports.
The chaplains reports were all submitted over a year ago yet for some reason, despite a commitment to do so, there is no sign of them being disseminated to the public. One might reasonably ask who is so afraid of what a bunch of people who provide spiritual and pastoral care to prisoners have to say.
Surely an unprecedented delay in publishing what are routine observations about how the State’s prisons operate is not an attempt to shut them up. Every year prison chaplains compile a report on how, from their vantage, they have observed prison life over the preceding 12 months.
There shouldn’t be anything controversial about it. These are not human rights investigators. They are not lawyers. They are not representing any non-governmental organisation concerned with the welfare of prisoners.
Instead, they are employed to act as a friendly ear for prisoners who may find themselves in need of advice, or just a friendly ear. Apart from that, they have eyes and ears themselves and can’t help observing the kind of conditions in which prisoners are being held.
And it is that innocuous function that apparently is causing consternation in the Irish Prison Service (IPS). The chaplains are providing an independent view of what exactly is going on in the prisons, particularly as it affects prisoners. That would appear to be simply too much of a loss of control for the IPS.
In recent years some chaplains have caused major ructions just for calling it as they see it. In 2021, the then chaplain for the Dochas Centre, Clare Hargaden, wrote to the director general of the IPS about the “fear, indifference, hostility and ineptitude” she encountered in the women’s prison.
“I write to you today filled with a mixture of sadness, anger, regret and probably most palpably right now, exhaustion,” she wrote. “I do not feel as things stand, that I can continue in my post as chaplain to the Dochas. My health has been deteriorating as a result of the toxic environment here for some time.”
That is not the kind of insight that the prison service believes should be disseminated to the public about what exactly goes on.
For a decade up until 2020 the IPS didn’t publish chaplains reports. Then after the applied for the 2019 reports under Freedom of Information Act, a protracted process ensued that eventually led to the reports’ release.
Some of the reports, including the Dochas, pointed towards unacceptable conditions in which prisoners were being held. Following that, the service announced that it would publishing the reports annually, just to demonstrate that it had nothing to hide.
The following year the reports for 2020 were published, but unfortunately it now appears this enlightened policy did not herald a brand new day. All of the reports for 2021 were submitted by March 31, 2022.
Ordinarily it should take a couple of months at the most before they appear on the IPS website. Then it emerged that the IPS was having problems with the report about GDPR. The reports were referred to as having been submitted in “draft” form, which is little more than a public relations invention.
The reports are never submitted in draft form. The GDPR line arose from the anonymised anecdotes about issues that had arisen with particular prisoners. The idea that any chaplain would even inadvertently allow a prisoner to be identified was insulting to the profession, but that was how it was being cast.
The IPS wrote to the chaplains on this, but according to sources, the whole thing is being viewed as an attempt to “censor and sanitise” the reports.
Mr Ó Cuív received an answer from the Minister for Justice that the reports are now with the Minister’s office for “information” purposes and should be published soon. An IPS spokesperson confirmed to the that this remained the situation. By now, the chaplains have submitted their 2022 reports and it’s anybody’s guess how long it will be before they see the light of day.
Frequently, the broadcast and print media issue stories of sweetness and light within the prison system about how well and innovative the progressive elements of the system are functioning. This is as it should be, informing the public about what is going on behind the high walls where society’s ills are processed.
Equally, however, it is imperative that a fuller picture of what exactly is going on is provided and as such the suppression of a few reports from individuals who are merely telling it as they see it is a worrying feature of how the penal system is being run.