The Minister for Justice has announced a timetable for prison closures, in a significant escalation of his dispute with prison officers over their overtime bill.
The first closure has been set for January 19th, just a week after the scheduled start of the latest talks with officers regarding the Minister's demand that the overall cost of overtime be cut in half.
After efforts in recent days failed to resolve the dispute about the overtime bill - some €64 million in 2003 - Mr McDowell yesterday announced not only his timetable for prison closures, but also said an advertisement inviting tenders from private companies seeking to run the prison escort service will appear in the EU journal next week.
It emerged last night that Garda and Defence Forces' personnel have undergone special training and visited all the State's prisons in recent weeks to ensure they can take over the running of the institutions in the event of a strike.
The Prison Officers' Association last night described the move as "provocative in the extreme" and a demonstration "that the Minister and the prison service never wanted to find a reasonable or just solution to the present dispute". The association's deputy general secretary, Mr Eugene Dennehy, said the Minister's real aim appeared to be "prison closures and privatisation".
According to the timetable announced last night, the Curragh detention centre will close on January 19th, followed by the prison on Spike Island in January 31st. On February 14th the Shelton Abbey open prison in Co Wicklow will become a pre-release hostel managed and staffed independently of the prison service. On February 28th the facility at Loughan House, Co Cavan, will follow suit.
Prison staff working at those facilities will be transferred to the State's other 12 prisons. The 94 prisoners currently in the Curragh and 63 on Spike Island will be transferred to other prisons.
The Cabinet approved these contingency plans last November amid signs that the six-year dispute between prison management and staff about overtime had moved no closer to resolution.
Mr McDowell said yesterday the closures could be reversed or cancelled if ongoing talks at the Labour Relations Commission with the Prison Officers' Association prove successful. Mr McDowell is seeking to implement a system whereby prison officers would receive a fixed sum in exchange for being available for seven hours' overtime a week. However, he warned there was a considerable gap between the two sides.
In addition to the closures, prisons around the State have been given substantially reduced overtime budgets for 2004. A recruitment embargo has been imposed, and there will be no staff transfers apart from those necessitated by the closure programme. Talks in recent days facilitated by the Labour Relations Commission failed to resolve the impasse. They have been adjourned until January 12th.
Mr Dennehy of the POA said the Department was seeking to get an additional one million hours worked by prison staff, without giving them any say in how this would be done or how much they should be paid for it. He said his members might now seek to work a 39-hour week, meaning no overtime at all would be worked.
He said his association had put forward its own proposals that could save up to €30 million from the overtime bill, and that overtime had a detrimental effect on his members' "work/life balance".
But Mr McDowell said the measures he had announced "result directly from the failure to agree alternative methods of containing prison staff costs within the amount voted by the Oireachtas".
Labour's spokesman on justice, Mr Joe Costello, last night criticised the decision, saying the prisons at the Curragh and Spike Island were among the most effective in the State and it made no sense to close them. Accusing Mr McDowell of adopting a "macho" stance, he said he had "frequently given the impression of being more interested in securing a victory over the POA than in securing agreement".