It is said often that all good things come to an end. So it appears for the beneficiaries of an overtime system in the prison service which, in terms of scale, has long been dysfunctional. That is not to detract from the role of prison officers who provide a valuable service to the community in an area most people would prefer to ignore. Nor is it a condemnation of the same beneficiaries for seeking to protect a status quo that is to their financial advantage. Criticism should be directed instead at successive governments which have failed to tackle the structural factors that allowed this unsustainable gravy train to continue.
Some credit is due then to Minister for Justice Michael McDowell for bringing the issue to a head. The case for reforming a system of overtime that allows some basic grade officers to earn more than €100,000 a year is compelling. And the State's 3,200 prison officers will find little public support for their decision by a two-to-one majority to reject proposals aimed at buying out the existing arrangements.
These proposals provide for prison officers to receive €13,750 each in compensation over three years, a new annual allowance based on 8 per cent of basic pay, and a new improved rate of overtime worked, set at 1.8 times the basic hourly pay; they would be expected also to work seven hours rostered overtime weekly. The effect is that a basic grade prison officer entering the service would receive €48,000, up from €37,000 and that the basic entry salary for a senior officer would be €70,000.
In response to prison officers' rejection, Mr McDowell is talking tough. He says he will proceed with the privatisation of parts of prison service. The Garda and the Army have, apparently, drawn up contingency plans in the event of strike action.
Whatever the outcome, however, the overtime issue remains little more than a symptom of a wider malaise that continues to undermine the prison service and the broader criminal justice system. This is based on the perennial problems of overcrowding, recidivism, drug abuse, insufficient health and educational facilities and the release of prisoners without proper preparation.
In this context, the latest annual report of the Inspector of Prisons and Places of Detention, Mr Justice Dermot Kinlen, makes disturbing reading. "There is much to change and unfortunately opposition to change. Money is being wasted and misdirected," the judge says. And in a direct message to Mr McDowell, he confides that he is forced to resort to repetition in the hope that by doing so, "something may eventually be achieved". Dispiriting reading indeed.