Arresting issue as Britain bids to send Irish prisoners home
A group of Conservative Party MPs want all Irish convicts in British prisons sent back to Ireland and incarcerated at the expense of the Irish taxpayer.
EU member states recently agreed a prisoner transfer deal which would see offenders deported to their native countries -- but Ireland negotiated an opt-out with the Gordon Brown government.
Now some Tory backbenchers are calling for that opt-out to be scrapped, with MP Andrew Percy stating: "There should be no EU prisoners in British prisons. They should be in prisons in their own countries, being paid for by their own taxpayers."
The Eurosceptic representative for the Brigg and Goole constituency added: "Members of any (British) government do not need to be brain surgeons to work out that the biggest foreign providers of our prison population are Ireland and Poland (who have a five-year opt-out).
"Knowing this, I cannot believe the last Labour government allowed these countries to pull out of the new prisoner transfer agreements."
There are 11,077 foreign prisoners in British jails. In December 2011, Irish and Polish prisoners officially accounted for 1,493 of the total.
It's estimated that the number of Irish prisoners alone is close to 900 and that figure has increased dramatically in just a year.
The Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas (ICPO) confirmed to the Irish Independent that it currently has 531 'clients' in the UK.
If all Irish prisoners in British jails were deported back to Ireland, the cost to the Irish State to keep them would come to almost €70m (£58m). And finding prison spaces for such a high number of criminals would add further costs to an already struggling prison service.
But as far as Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, is concerned, all non-British European prisoners should be sent back from where they came as a matter of urgency.
"We have prisons rapidly approaching full capacity, so we do not need them clogged up with foreigners who could quite easily be serving their sentences back in their own countries."
And Dominic Raab, Tory MP for Esher and Walton, said: "The fact that we can't deport prisoners convicted of serious crimes is a damning indictment of the flimsy EU arrangements."
In late December the total prison population in England and Wales hit an all-time high of 87,960 as it moves at speed towards maximum capacity.
The Tory-led coalition does not want to increase hugely unpopular 'early release schemes', as introduced under Labour, so the issue of widescale deportation of foreign prisoners is likely to be debated further in the coming weeks.
It's estimated that the cost to the British taxpayer of imprisoning Irish inmates comes to just over £30m (€36m) a year.
Justice Minister Ken Clarke hopes to reduce the prison population to about 82,000 by the time of the next general election and all options that would help facilitate this are on the table.
Prime Minister David Cameron has refused to rule out deportation without consent to Ireland, saying: "We are looking at how we can transfer prisoners who are foreign nationals from the UK to other countries. Obviously with Ireland the situation is slightly different, because of the long relationship between our countries.
"But there is still the specific issue with Ireland, and I will ask the justice secretary to look at it to see whether we can do a little better."
However, the ICPO said that all cases involving the deportation of Irish prisoners should be analysed on an individual basis.
A spokesperson said: "Some Irish prisoners in the UK may wish to serve the remainder of their sentences in Ireland so they can be closer to family and friends. But many other prisoners have close family and social ties in the UK and would suffer undue hardship if they were forced to serve their sentences in Ireland."
Irish Independent
