They are there to defend women who have committed what are known to advocates who work with female offenders as survival crimes — ones carried out to help put food on the table, clothes on their children’s backs and alcohol to meet their addictions.
Research conducted by the Irish Examiner of more than 5,000 court cases from the Cork city courts between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2024, found 13% of people sentenced to jail time in Cork in that time period were women.
The data also shows that just under 61% of the 183 women jailed were convicted for theft offences, with the average age being 34. According to the research, women are typically given sentences averaging 11 months, with more than two-thirds of the cases mentioning previous offences.
Some could be described as career criminals. One woman, who had an address at Cork Simon, had almost 250 previous convictions, including over 170 for theft. Another had 211 offences, 81 of which were for theft. Another had close to 200; another over 170.
Also among the statistics are a small number of women who were accused of child neglect and cruelty. One allegedly locked children in their rooms while drinking and received three concurrent six-month sentences, which were suspended due to rehabilitation progress and family bonding.
The woman had a previous conviction for cruelty to children in similar circumstances. The court was told that she was addicted to prescription tablets and alcohol.
Behind the statistics are women suffering from trauma resulting from domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and unresolved grief, while homelessness is also a key factor.
The research shows that just over half of female offenders jailed for theft have addiction issues, and are likely to either have an address with Cork Simon or be of no fixed address. The percentage of offenders with addiction issues stands at around 70% for those convicted on public order or assault charges.
Executive director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, Saoirse Brady, says the findings of the Irish Examiner survey are borne out by what the IPRT sees.
“We have definitely heard stories of mothers having to shoplift baby food or food to feed their kids. We are in a homelessness crisis, a cost-of-living crisis — that is not to excuse people committing offences, but at the same time, they are not able to make ends meet. If there is an addiction, there on top of that, that is going to play a part too.
“While some of the convictions are not related to drugs as such, they are underpinned by the fact that people have an addiction or a substance misuse issue, and they need to get money to fund that addiction.
We really need to start dealing with that root cause of why it is happening in the first place, and further than that, why are people in addiction, why are they misusing substances and end up in the criminal justice system?
“Certainly, with women, there is huge underlying trauma.”
She continued: “So many of them have been victims of violence themselves, whether that is domestic violence, sexual abuse and other types of violence, very many of them are self-medicating to deal with that trauma.
“Until we deal with that and provide adequate community services that deal with those underlying issues, we are going to continue to see women ending up in the criminal justice system.”
Decriminalisation of drugs is something which has been raised through the Citizens’ Assembly and the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice. This is something which both Ms Brady and Paula Kearney of the Saol Project in Dublin believe is central to helping reduce the number of women in prisons.
Paula Kearney, who coordinates the BRIO programme, which organises visits to the women’s Dóchas Centre prison on the Mountjoy campus for peer group sessions with inmates, strongly believes a community court model is important to help women in the criminal justice system.
“We have started locking women at a much higher rate over the past few years. Since 2019, there has been a huge increase in the number of women being incarcerated.”
On Tuesday, the female facility in Limerick was at 163% capacity, with 91 in custody in a prison which has a bed capacity for 56. Meanwhile, the Dóchas centre was at 125% capacity, with 13 of the 183 inmates sleeping on mattresses.
Ms Kearney says: “The overcrowding brings a whole new level of issues in itself. You can’t blame it on the prison or the staff — it’s the system that is failing. There is no need to be locking up women for short sentences, particularly in a country where we are so overcrowded in female prison spaces. Why aren’t we creating alternatives to prison?”
This is echoed by Ruthanne Barry, who describes herself as a reformed person of incarceration and who has been an advocate for improvements to the justice system. She was recently invited to speak with politicians at Leinster House.
“If you have women in prison for three-month sentences, why not find an alternative? Why not bring in the tagging? It’s working in the UK. Or what about community sanctions?”
Paula Kearney cites the Red Hook Community Justice Centre in Brooklyn in New York as an example which should be emulated here.
“It is a community-based court where the judge comes to the community centre, and there is no hierarchy. The people who are there are at his feet — he is not sitting above them. There is a sense of equality when you go in.
“People are sitting in a room. They are getting the support that individuals need. The supports are being put in place to wrap around that person so they would have the best chance of succeeding instead of going to prison, and that is what we need to create in Ireland. Particularly for women.”
The IPRT is awaiting legislative progression on increasing community-based sanctions and less reliance on prisons.
Ms Brady says: “We have seen commitments in the Programme for Government, particularly around community-based sanctions and we have started to see movement on that already so the Civil and Criminal Law Miscellaneous Provisions Bill does contain provisions to extend community service orders so I think there is an understanding there that we need to be looking at more community-based sanctions but what we really need to see is that Community Sanctions Bill that was first published in 2024 being resurrected and brought to life.
“That is where we think there will be traction around the principle of prison as a last resort, placed on a statutory footing.
“One of the very important parts of the Miscellaneous Provisions Bill from our point of view is that judges will have to give reasons why they are choosing custody over a community service order.”
She said sending someone to prison time and time again without actually providing them with the interventions that they require doesn’t work, whereas serving their sentence in the community, where they might have a network of people around them, where they could maintain or rebuild family relationships, could.
However, a commitment contained in the Programme for Government for an exploration of an open prison for women is also seen as an important one for improving outcomes for female offenders.
Ms Brady is concerned that there has been talk of the possibility of opening 50 new spaces at the Dóchas centre, as well as 100 spaces for women in Cork, which previously has not held female offenders.
“That is creating more closed prison spaces. We don’t want to see any more spaces for women. We want to see a move towards community-based sanctions, but at the same time, if they are going to create more spaces, where is the open prison for women? That is a question that CEDAW repeatedly asked last week.”
Paula Kearney is also adamant that an open prison is required for women.
On Tuesday, there were 128 inmates in Loughan House and 116 in Shelton Abbey — the two open prisons for men.
“For men who have been in doing long sentences, they get moved to an open prison, and at least they are starting to get their days out and coming back then to sleep in the prison. They are starting to reintegrate back into society and getting them little steps.
“But for women, their time is just up, and they have to leave, and there is no concern for where they are going, or if they are going to need supports for mental health or housing.
“Housing is one of the bigger issues for women, in terms of when they go to prison, they could have their own home with their children at home. Something happens, they get into trouble and go into prison. A lot of times, the children may end up in voluntary or State care; sometimes, the home is gone by the time the woman comes out.
“What happens then is that for the woman to work with Tusla on a trajectory plan to get her children back in her care, she must have stable accommodation for that to happen. There is no leeway then because she is not getting lone parents, child benefit or anything for those children, so she cannot put them children on her application.
“She needs a stable home to be able to take her children back into her care, but she no longer fits the criteria for the home that she needs because the children are not in her care and she is not getting the payments. So it is a horrible Catch 22 that just creates more misery, not just for that woman but for the wider family.”
Ruthanne Barry agrees that an open prison for women is needed.
“There are not enough services out there for women. Once the prison lets you out that door, you are gone. Some women are using it as a safety net — they are going out and committing a crime to come back in and have a bed. Why is prison a safety net for someone? That is just showing that the system is failing.”
The rising number of women in prison is cause for concern for the IPRT, considering that the numbers in the probation service are also increasing.
Saoirse Brady says: “If we were seeing a drop in the number of women going to prison and more people going into probation, you would say that they are getting community sentences, but they are not.
“There is the perception, particularly when it comes to women, that they are going to get access to the services they have never gotten before in prison. In the past, that may have been true,e but at the moment, given that the two women’s prisons are regularly and routinely the most overcrowded in the State, that is not possible for them to get the help that they need.
“Plus, with the long waiting list for services that are already overstretched for prisons, combined with the short sentences, women are not even at the top of the queue for assessment before they are out again. They go back to the end of the queue in the community, and the cycle just continues.”
The IPRT believes that a bail supervision scheme for women is vital. There is already such a scheme in place for juveniles. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee revealed in reply to a parliamentary question over a year ago that such a scheme for female offenders is being considered.
Ms Brady says: “This is where we really need to go. When we see so many women ending up on short sentences where they would be better served by services in the community that would help turn their lives around than being put into prison, it is a black hole.”
Paula Kearney is hopeful that eliminating short sentences would be a key step in the rehabilitation of female offenders.
If we stop locking people up for short sentences, we could create spaces for people who should be doing longer sentences for harder crimes.
“I get that we can’t just have no prisons, but we need to be more humane with them.”
Last August, the visiting committee report for 2022 for the Dóchas centre for women in Mountjoy was published. It highlighted “concern and unease about the inappropriate detention of women with serious mental ill-health in the Dóchas Centre and continues to request urgent action in this matter.”
The report continued: “Our concerns also reflect international best practice.
“The Bangkok rules state that women who are in prison should have gender-specific responses to mental health care and that alternatives to prison should be available for women.”
Saoirse Brady says that female offenders “have huge mental health issues — experiences of underlying trauma, been victims themselves”, which can be exacerbated by the impact of prison overcrowding.
She also notes that there is a stigma surrounding women who have been imprisoned, particularly those who are mothers:
There is a societal attitude towards women, and in particular towards mothers, who go to prison, that they have failed their children.
At a recent examination of Ireland’s progress in tackling discrimination against women and girls at a UN hearing in Geneva, questions were asked of the Irish delegation about mother and baby units in prisons.
Last year, 26 women were pregnant while in prison here, with five giving birth while in custody.
Ruthanne Barry was pregnant while in prison, giving birth just under two weeks after being released in 2015. She also says she had a miscarriage while in prison.
She recalls of her own experience of miscarriage, of “bleeding alone in a cell without access to immediate or adequate medical support or aftercare.”
And she says: “I carried a pregnancy through incarceration, isolated with no birthing companion or anyone to share the joy of pregnancy.”
On leaving prison, she was placed in emergency accommodation, which resulted in her not being able to have her two older children with her because they were over ten years old.
She says: “My newborn daughter could stay, and also my eldest daughter, but not my boys. That made rebuilding our bond incredibly difficult.”
She continues: “Cells are often no larger than a standard car parking space. A cot might fit, but where is the space for a baby to crawl? To play? To develop? To reach vital milestones. What are we asking of a child in such a confined environment?
We must ask ourselves what the long-term impact is not only on women but on their children.”
Saoirse Brady says that while prison rules allow a mother to keep her baby with her for the first year, the conditions they are in are “unacceptable”.
She continues: “What we need to be looking at here is what they had in the UK — sentencing guidelines for pregnant women, for women in the pre-natal stage and women who have just given birth. When those sentencing guidelines came in in England and Wales, you did see a fall in the number of pregnant women and new mothers being in prison. We have to ask the question: Do they really need to be there? Is whatever offence they have committed serious enough to warrant a custodial sentence, that you are then putting a baby in prison as well?”
A spokesman for the Irish Prison Service said that pregnant inmates receive all of their antenatal care and education through the services of the local HSE maternity hospital in the community.
“When needed and in cases of emergency, specialist midwives will attend the prison; however, this is not normally required. Expectant mothers are always facilitated to have their children born in a hospital. There is a mother and baby unit in Limerick Female Prison, and in the Dóchas Centre, mothers and their babies are housed in single room accommodation. ”
He said the new women’s prison in Limerick “offers state-of-the-art” facilities to care for pregnant prisoners and provides several areas where the care of mothers and babies can be facilitated safely.
“Work has commenced to bring on stream the potential for additional accommodation for up to 26 female prisoners at the Dóchas Centre.”
With regard to the Dóchas Centre, there is ongoing concern in the IPRT at the failure to publish two reports on the centre, which are believed to have been carried out after the 2020 Inspector of Prisons report into the facility was published with parts redacted.
Saoirse Brady says: “There were some really worrying things in there about women being held in isolation, the staff-women relationships. We don’t know what is in those (other two) reports. The Minister keeps citing legal reasons so we are not sure if that might be industrial relations reasons, maybe the staff could be identified from what was said. But we don’t know.
And that is really worrying that we have no idea on why they are not being published, apart from legal reasons, when you are talking about such a marginalised, vulnerable cohort of people, and we don’t know what is going on behind closed doors.”
She points out that a further general inspection of the centre conducted by the Office of the Inspector of Prisons last year also has not been published as yet.
The spokesman for the Irish Prison Service said that prisoner care and rehabilitation is an aim of the organisation, and seeks to manage sentences in a way that encourages and supports prisoners in their efforts to live law-abiding and purposeful lives on release.
He said that specific courses are run for women in custody to help deal with trauma, addiction, parenting under pressure and Traveller Mediation, which are facilitated mostly by stakeholders.
In relation to the Dochas reports, a Department of Justice spokesman said: “It is not yet possible to publish or comment further on their contents at this time as these reports are the subject of legal consideration.”
He added that the Inspector of Prisons submitted a general inspection report on the Dóchas Centre arising from an unannounced inspection carried out over a number of days in September and October 2023.
He said the findings and recommendations are currently being reviewed by officials in the Department of Justice and the Irish Prison Service.
He added that its publication will be arranged “as soon as is practicable”.