McDowell digs deeper into bunker

MORE damning proof of the restrictive mentality of the Department of Justice is evidenced by its bizarre response to a request submitted by this newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act for data relating to the level of drugs and suicides in Irish prisons.

Astonishingly, in this hi-tech communications era, such information concerning two of the biggest problems confronting the prison service does not, we are told, exist in collated form.

According to the department, it can only be accessed on a file-by-file examination of the records of individual prisoners. And the whopping bill for conducting this trawl would come to almost 10,000.