The annual cost of keeping a person in prison is now almost €100,000, the Dáil Public Accounts Committee will be told on Thursday.
Irish Prison Service director general Caron McCaffrey will say that the system is operating at almost 120 per cent of capacity with more than 5,500 people in custody. She will say that in 2024 there was a sustained growth in the prison population with a 9.6 per cent increase in committals.
Separately, the Department of Justice will tell the committee that about 60,000 people from countries such as Brazil and India have arrived in the State over the last year or so.
“In the twelve-month period to April of this year, the Central Statistics Office recorded that almost 125,300 people moved to Ireland. This included 31,500 returning Irish citizens, with 30,200 arrivals from the UK and EU countries. Approximately 50 per cent came from other countries, such as India and Brazil, to work or study.
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“They make enormously positive contributions to our society and to our economy,” secretary general of the Department of Justice Oonagh McPhillips will say in her opening statement.
Ms McCaffrey will say that the cost of keeping a person in custody had increased by 11.9 per cent “with the annual cost of a prison space in 2024 being €99,072″.
Ms McPhillips will also tell the committee that a crisis caused by a rapid increase in the numbers of asylum applicants, as well as the number of people arriving from Ukraine, meant “parts of the [accommodation] system were not brought on in the ideal configurations, nor at the value for public money we could expect to achieve in more normal times”.
She will say that “the crisis period meant that emergency sourcing of a wide range of accommodation options was essential”. That this is why “we now have a much larger system than we needed in 2021, but also why it expanded into further commercial provision”.
Ms McPhillips will also say that between 2022 and last year, 159,000 people arrived in the Republic seeking temporary or international protection, including 114,000 who fled the war in Ukraine.
“This placed exceptional demands on the State’s protection and accommodation systems and ... The International Protection Office [IPO] continued to expand its capacity and improve efficiency. Investment in digitisation, re-engineered processes and additional staffing transformed its operations. Staffing more than tripled – from 143 in 2019 to 620 in 2024. The IPO delivered over 14,000 first-instance decisions in 2024, compared with 8,500 in 2023.
“The International Protection Appeals Tribunal closed 3,100 appeals, almost double the previous year. These results reflected strong progress following sustained investment – progress that we have continued to build upon this year.”
