Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan has said he was “surprised” that the Irish Prison Service paid almost €25,000 to The 2 Johnnies comedy duo for a podcast as part of a drive to recruit more prison officers.
The Minister said it was “a lot of money to spend on a podcast for recruitment” when he was asked about the payment after it emerged on Wednesday.
The IPS confirmed that a fee of €20,000, plus €4,600 in VAT, was agreed with the Tipperary entertainers for the show.
The sponsored hour-long podcast featured prison staff speaking about life working in an Irish jail and the advantages of a job in the penal system.
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“I’m surprised that amount of money was spent. It doesn’t strike me as a necessary expenditure when you consider all the obligations that rest on the prison service,” said Mr O’Callaghan.
It has also emerged that the comedy act received no payment from An Garda Síochána for a similar podcast with two garda recruits.
Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly said the Garda “did the same podcast” last year, when Garda members were interviewed by The 2 Johnnies “and we didn’t pay anything for it”.
He added it was “really useful for us ... it was a really good audience for us” at a time when the Garda was running its own recruitment campaign.
The Minister was asked about the payment while attending the annual conference of the Association of Garda Superintendents (AGS) in Trim, Co Meath.
He said he went to the National Ploughing Championships last week to launch the new Garda recruitment competition at no expense and that the commissioner does this promotion work for recruitment too.
Mr O’Callaghan said public money had “to be spent efficiently and carefully”.
Asked about recent public order incidents in Dublin, Mr O’Callaghan and Mr Kelly said a new plan to increase the number of gardaí on the streets would yield clear results before Christmas.
They both rejected the allegation Dublin is unsafe or is run by street gangs in places.
Reacting to the two serious stabbings that took place in Dublin over the weekend, including a gang attack that left a 17-year-old with up to 20 wounds, Mr O’Callaghan said Dublin was “a large international capital city”.
“We are going to get some criminal activity in a city of that size. I am also aware attacks get a lot of national coverage,” Mr O’Callaghan said.
Mr O’Callaghan said the victims of assaults and other crimes, including the man and teenager attacked in Dublin at the weekend, would say they were not safe in Dublin, but overall, he believed the city was safe.
He said the latest data from the Garda and the HSE showed that knife crime and injuries from knife assaults were down and insisted that gardaí “have access to and control all parts of Dublin city”.
Mr Kelly, who took over as Garda Commissioner from Drew Harris last month, said there was no part of Dublin that was a no-go area run or even dominated by criminals.
“Dublin is a large city with 1¾ million, approximately, people in it. In any large city, you’re going to have lots of incidents,” he said, though he accepted some people felt unsafe.
A high-visibility operation was in place in the areas policed by Store Street, Pearse Street and Kevin Street Garda stations in Dublin city, having been rolled out by Assistant Commissioner Paul Cleary. This included far more frontline uniform gardaí on the beat, which was now being extended to other parts of the city and would become very obvious in the period to Christmas.
AGS president Supt Colm Murphy said that the new “operating policing model”, which has amalgamated several Garda divisions into much larger “super divisions”, was now fully rolled out.
However, the promised increase in manpower required to staff the additional roles for superintendents had not been delivered. This has resulted in “weakened links” between Garda members of all ranks and the communities they policed.
The superintendents want numbers in their ranks increased from 168 at present to at least 190. Mr Kelly said he was examining the numbers and believed more superintendents posts were needed.
There are about 14,400 members of all ranks in the Garda and Mr Kelly said he hoped the force would reach 15,000 next year.
The process of joining the Garda had been expedited with a much shorter period between being offered a place in the force and starting training.
