Prisoners filed nearly 1,000 complaints last year, including 70 deemed ‘Category A’ allegations of assault, excessive force, racial abuse, discrimination or intimidation, reports The Mirror.
More than a third of the complaints came from Midland Maximum Security Prison in County Laois, where 25 separate complaints were filed.
Of the 70 complaints filed so far, only one has been upheld and one has been deemed ‘vexatious’, reports The Mirror.
A total of 26 complaints were dismissed and two were withdrawn, while most are incomplete and still under investigation.
The Irish Prison Service has said it is concerned about long delays in dealing with the most serious allegations made by prisoners.
The IPS said this was due to a lack of suitably qualified investigators and the backlog created during the pandemic, when detainees could not always be interviewed face to face.
Last year, there were 70 ‘Category A’ complaints out of around 1,000 made by prisoners in the Irish prison system, according to figures released by the FOI.
Three prisons – Midlands in Laois and Mountjoy and Cloverhill in Dublin – accounted for 627 of the 975 complaints, reports The Mirror.
In 2022, 113 ‘Category B’ complaints were received, which involved verbal abuse of prisoners by staff or improper searches of cells.
A spokesman for the Irish Prison Service said: “All the prisoners have a right to complain and each one is treated with the utmost seriousness,” reports The Mirror.
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