THE director-general of the Irish Prison Service will convene a meeting of the national steering group on deaths in prison "as a matter of urgency" following the second prison suicide within a week.
The Irish Penal Reform Trust has described the death of a 25-year-old Limerick man in his cell in Dublin's Mountjoy prison yesterday as evidence of the "failure" of the Irish prison system.
An internal investigation is under way into the circumstances of the man's death, though a spokesman for the Prisons Authority said the man was not considered to be "at risk".
The man was found in his cell shortly after 4 a.m., when the alarm was raised by another prisoner. It is understood that he hanged himself from bars in the cell using his bed-sheet. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the Mater hospital.
The man's family has requested that details about him be kept private, though it is understood that he was in the early stages of a three-month sentence for larceny. It was his first time in prison.
Last Thursday a prisoner at Wheatfield Prison in Dublin took his life, also by hanging himself with a makeshift noose made of bed-clothes. The following day it emerged day that he had previously attempted to take his own life on two occasions.
While the circumstances of each suicide are being reviewed by the individual prison authorities, the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, has asked the director general of the Prison Service to hold a combined review to determine any common features in the deaths.
The Fine Gael spokesman on Justice, Mr Jim Higgins, called on Mr O'Donoghue to reveal why the man who died at Mountjoy had not had a psychiatric assessment. He said the Minister "must explain the reason that a young man who was two weeks in prison did not have a psychiatric assessment carried out.
"Coming in the wake of the revelation that the young man who took his life at Wheatfield Prison last week made two previous suicide attempts and had not been referred for counselling, it is an absolute scandal." It was quite clear that the prison medical, psychiatric and psychological services were inadequate, added Mr Higgins.
Mountjoy Prison has no full-time psychiatrist, though a psychiatrist from the Central Mental Hospital visits several times a week, a spokeswoman for the prison said.
Meanwhile, the director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, Dr Ian O'Donnell, said the case showed that prison was "not a suitable sanction" for people who had committed minor offences and were serving short sentences.
He said putting young men and women in prison for minor offences put "enormous psychological pressure" on them, doing more harm than good.
"The development of more options than prison must be put in front of the judiciary," Dr O'Donell said.
He said imprisonment suggested society had "given up on these people", adding he could "only imagine" the kind of pressure the young man was under, away from home and in prison for a relatively minor crime.
"Ireland has the highest rate of incarceration in Europe," he said. "The high use of short, sharp shocks of incarceration just does not work."
The rate of imprisonment in the State is 21 per 1000 recorded crimes, which compares with 11 in England, Wales and Germany, 10 in the Netherlands and five in Sweden.
"These countries do not have a less serious crime problem than we do," said Dr O'Donnell. "They simply resort less frequently to custody."
