A judge has called on the Government to introduce electronic tagging as a means of releasing prisoners from jail and freeing badly needed prison spaces.
District Court Judge Michael Pattwell said he had seen electronic tagging operating in the United States a number of years ago and believed it would work equally well in the Republic.
He also called on the Government to provide more funding for voluntary groups working with marginalised people to help keep them out of prison, as well as those working to reduce social problems such as domestic violence.
The judge told a seminar in Cork on the role of voluntary groups that the amount of money spent by the State on helping people stay out of prison was infinitesmal compared to overall Government spending.
Tagging, he said, "sounds horrific - you hear tagging and you have visions of cattle with ear tags, but actually most people aren't aware of it". "It is ideally suited to remand prisoners who, no matter what we may think about them, are still innocent at that stage and entitled to the fullest freedom possible that the law can give.
"I don't know how many remand prisoners there are but it is very large indeed - you have three or four remand courts sitting in Dublin each day.
"The benefit of it is that it would free up so many prison beds that it would probably stop the prison building scheme that's going all over the country now."
On funding for voluntary bodies he said: "We find that in 1996, of the £487 million expended through the voluntary sector, only £2.89 million was allotted to the Department of Justice Probation and Welfare Service. That's just 0.6 per cent of the total - 0.6 per cent to probably the most needy sector of society.
"It's the equivalent of keeping between 50 and 60 prisoners in one of our penal institutions for a year and if we look at the overall revenue of the State, the amount of money spent trying to keep people out of prison is infinitesmal," he said.
Judge Pattwell gave the example of domestic violence, which he said was taking up increasingly more of his court work as women sought protection orders, safety orders and barring orders against violent and abusive spouses and partners.
"The Family Centre in Paul Street in Cork ran a course to deal with violent men - a badly needed thing - and now I've heard that the programme has had to be scrapped, or certainly curtailed, because of a lack of a very small amount of money," he said.
The absence of funding for such courses meant that this Christmas may well be ruined for many families because violent men haven't got treatment and they come home drunk on Christmas Eve and their wife and partner has to get a barring order.
"The gardai are called out, the District Court clerks are called out, I'm called out - Christmas is ruined for everyone, not least of all the little children in the house, and it could all have been avoided if courses like this had been funded."
The seminar, which was organised by the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs in conjunction with the Fr Mathew Centre in Cork, was aimed at generating discussion and submissions on the Government White Paper on Voluntary Groups.