Mick Clifford: Worrying signs from penal system with delayed prison chaplains reports

It has emerged that the IPS is having problems with the chaplains reports for 2021 about GDPR. This is little more than a public relations invention, writes Mick Clifford

In 2021, the then chaplain for the Dochas Centre, Clare Hargaden, wrote to the director general of the IPS about the “fear, indifference, hostility and ineptitude” she encountered in the women’s prison. File picture

On March 21 last, Eamon Ó Cuív asked the Minister for Justice when exactly the prison chaplains reports for 2021 would be published. 

This was the second time that the Fianna Fáil TD for Galway West asked the question in four months. In the interim, on February 8, Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy asked about the failure to publish the reports.