Prisoner transfer - Legal debacle must be sorted

IT is alarming that 10 prisoners, who were transferred to Irish jails while serving lengthy sentences in Britain, have had to be released from prison during the last six months because of a serious loophole in the law.

Making a mockery of the prisoner transfer agreement between the two nations, Ireland was left with no other choice but to release them because one prisoner claimed there were significant differences between Irish and UK sentencing policies.

Effectively this meant his detention warrant was invalid. The worrying implication of this legal cock-up is that the freed prisoners were at the serious end of the criminal scale.