Serious overcrowding, violence and cuts in resources have impacted on inmates in the prison system, according to the Visiting Committee.

Many jailed sex offenders are released into an “unsupervised and unsupported abyss” that inevitably results in them reoffending and returning to prison, an official inspection body has said.

Concerns have been raised over support given to elderly prisoners in a Dublin jail.

NOTORIOUS convicted paedophile Tony Walsh has given a description of the inmate who knifed him in the face in prison on Sunday.

The rapist at the centre of the "C Case" in the 1990's has been jailed for 21 years by Mr Justice George Birmingham for raping an 86-year-old woman in her home last year.

A new National Centre for Sex Offenders is to be set up at Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin.

The suspension of the Sex Offender Programme (SOP) at Arbour Hill Prison has attracted a degree of attention, but the real scandal has been the inadequacy of even that programme, which was the only dedicated treatment for sex offenders. Only 42 of the 578 sex offenders released in the past five years completed SOP.

The Court of Criminal Appeal has reduced the prison sentence imposed on a Dublin man who kidnapped and raped a Spanish au pair after it ruling that comments made at the his sentencing hearing by Mr Justice Paul Carney were "inappropriate"and "indefensible."

A previously convicted Donegal rapist has been jailed for 11 years by Mr Justice Kevin O’Higgins at the Central Criminal Court for attempting to rape another woman last October.

Severe overcrowding, drugs, and the lack of in-cell sanitation are major problems in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison, a report revealed today.

VISITING committees have released their annual reports for 2005 on Ireland’s prisons. Here are the main concerns expressed.

People with mental illnesses are still being sent to prison instead of a psychiatric institution, prison chaplains warned today.

COUNCILLORS earned almost €33,000 in expenses and allowances for visiting prisons in 2002, it emerged yesterday.

LAWYERS for convicted killer Mark Nash have claimed he should not be forced to give evidence at an inquest into the deaths of two women who were murdered in Dublin five years ago.

THE prime suspect for the murder of two female patients in the grounds of a Dublin psychiatric hospital in 1997 has refused to attend an inquest into their deaths.