Prisons in the Republic of Ireland

Since independence, the Republic of Ireland has enjoyed an extremely low rate of imprisonment in comparison with the rate when it was part of the United Kingdom. Recently, however, there has been considerable growth in its prison population. The Troubles in Northern Ireland led to a large spike in its prison population in the last third of the 20th century, which ended with the Belfast Agreement's early-release scheme.

Prisons in Northern Ireland are run by the Northern Ireland Prison Service.

In 1925, shortly after the establishment of the Irish Free State, the then Minister for Justice, Kevin O'Higgins, introduced legislation repealing the existing ability of grand juries to appoint visiting committees to prisons within the State. Instead, the authority to appoint the members of prison visiting committees was vested solely in the person of the Minister. Similarly, the management of the prison system within the Irish Free State passed to the control of the Minister with the dissolution by statutory instrument of the General Prisons Board for Ireland (the G.P.B.) in 1928. The G.P.B. had been an all-Ireland body. Thus, by this date, both the responsibility and control over the management and oversight of the prison service within the Twenty-Six Counties was held within the Minister's department.

This situation remained unchanged until 1999 when the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, John O'Donoghue, established the Irish Prison Service to which was delegated the task of managing the day-to-day running of the prison system. Simultaneously in 1999 a Prisons Authority Interim Board was established and its members were appointed by the Minister in 2000. The purpose of this board was to advise the Director General and directors of the Irish Prison Service on the management of the penal system. In 2002 the retired High Court Judge, Dermot Kinlen, was appointed the state's first Inspector of Irish Prisons. However, none of these new bodies was ever established on a statutory basis despite indications to the contrary. indeed, as recently as January 2011 Dermot Ahern informed the Dáil that:

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