A “failure of political will” to limit numbers in the largest women’s prison shows “a willingness to warehouse people in degrading and inhumane conditions”, according to an unpublished report.
The 2025 annual report from the Dóchas Centre visiting committee, submitted to Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan last month, says overcrowding at the prison “is the worst it has ever been”.
The report, obtained by The Irish Times, is unlikely to be published for several months.
It asks: “What will it take for the Minister ... to set a maximum occupancy for our prisons? Do we simply continue cramming people into increasingly unsuitable spaces until there are sufficient serious injuries or deaths to prompt action?”
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As of Friday, there were 227 women incarcerated in the Dóchas Centre, including 37 women on mattresses on the floor.
The prison has 146 beds, so it is operating at 155 per cent capacity.
Echoing concerns raised last month that foreign nationals arrested and held before deportation were being “dumped” into prisons, the committee says: “We find it extraordinary that the Garda National Immigration Bureau [GNIB] can simply arrive at an already dangerously overcrowded prison and present multiple women for detention on the grounds of immigration status, without giving any prior notice to prison management.
“We strongly recommend that the GNIB are not permitted to hand any detainees into the custody of any prison that is already running above 100 per cent capacity.”
It calls for “concerted action” to use alternative sanctions to prison for women facing shorter sentences, such as probation, restorative justice and community service.
Almost 80 per cent of women sentenced in 2024 were for less than 12 months, it finds.
“Women serving short sentences are not incarcerated long enough to do the rehabilitative work that might change the trajectory of their lives ... but they are locked up long enough to lose their accommodation, their job prospects,” the report notes.
Intellectually disabled women prisoners were “falling through the cracks”, states the report. They were “very vulnerable and underserved by the service,” the prison medical team told the committee.
Despite a “paucity” of data on intellectually disabled prisoners, it was likely to be a “significant minority” who experience prison as “frightening”.
“This is a profoundly serious situation and needs urgent attention,” says the report.
Echoing previous years’ reports, it says women who need psychiatric treatment should not be sent to prison; the resourcing of existing psychiatric in-reach teams should be increased and specific training for staff to deal with women with severe mental health difficulties should be provided.
[ Women prisoners left to huddle in doorways during storm while locked outsideOpens in new window ]
“The fact that we could simply cut and paste both our recommendations and our progress updates on this issue year on year is dispiriting beyond belief,” says the report.
The six-person committee, established under the Prison (Visiting Committees) Act 1925, visited the Dóchas Centre 54 times in 2025,
It also visited Castlerea Prison, seeing “first-hand what a progressive model of detention can look like, given the space, vision and commitment”.
The committee notes an “excessive delay” between its “timely submission” of annual reports by April each year and their publication by the Minister. The 2024 report was published on December 22nd, 2025, without a press release.
This “suggests an intent that the reports fulfil the legal responsibility of being made public, while attracting as little actual attention or scrutiny as possible”, it says.
An Irish Prison Service spokesman would not comment on “an unpublished report”.
