Madam, - The Minister for Justice is discussing the possible closure and sale of the new women's prison at Mountjoy Prison, the Dóchas Centre. This prison, which opened just four years ago in 1999 and cost £30 million to build, is to be abandoned for commercial development.
The Dóchas Centre represents the realisation of a vision for women in prison shared by some officials in the Prison Service, the management and staff of the women's prison at Mountjoy and two successive female Ministers for Justice, Nora Owen and Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. The prison took years to develop, years of committed hard work on the part of these people, years of dialogue and discussion through visit after visit to the old women's prison at Mountjoy of committees, commentators and representatives.
As well as the building itself there is the entire social structure of that institution, meticulously engineered over years by John Lonergan and staff of the women's prison. This encompasses training opportunities for women prisoners in FÁS and CERT, educational, employment and voluntary work opportunities for the women, to which the women can walk from the prison and all of which may be availed of by the women through the complex network of social relationships developed by the staff of the prison. The social structure also encompasses the work of the volunteer befrienders of the women's prison - women from the city who, at the invitation of prison management, have visited women in the prison weekly for years.
Most of the tiny, marginalised population of Irish female prisoners are women who never got a break; the Dóchas Centre is about giving them a break. There are at any time only 100 women in prison in Ireland and there are very few serious criminals among them. The women's crimes are now, as they were historically, generally of a petty, personal or sexual nature. About 80 women are imprisoned in the Dóchas Centre at Mountjoy Prison; most of them come from Dublin's north inner city. They are poor women, many of them drug addicts. The oldest operating prison in the country, Limerick Prison, a male prison, has a capacity for 20 women prisoners. The women in Limerick Prison are held in a tiny wing of that prison in recently refurbished accommodation which resembles, more than anything else, a sealed tomb.
Michael McDowell is proposing to move the populations of Mountjoy Prison to anywhere he can buy a cheap site. He is planning to move them far away from their complex network of supports. For the Minister, the entire social, educational, developmental, rehabilitative agenda of the Dóchas Centre is irrelevant. The Minister's ambitions are purely financial. - Yours etc.,
CHRISTINA QUINLAN, School of Communications, DCU, Dublin 9.