DUBLIN, THURSDAY, 9 JULY 2026 – The Office of the Inspector of Prisons (OIP) is Ireland’s independent watchdog responsible for inspecting prisons and investigating deaths in prison custody. Its Annual Report 2025 has been published today (9 July 2026), highlighting that worsening conditions in Irish prisons have triggered national and international concern.

Commenting on the Report, Chief Inspector of Prisons, Mark Kelly, said, “The population in Ireland’s prisons is inching ever closer to the grim milestone of 6,000 people, for a bed capacity of just 4,767. Today (9 July 2026), 5,817 people are in prison custody, almost a tenth of whom are not even being provided with a bed. That 520 people are being obliged to sleep on mattresses on the floor in overcrowded cells next to unpartitioned toilets is nothing short of a national disgrace.”

Mr Kelly continued: “I have written and spoken about the scourge of overcrowding on many occasions since taking up the role of Chief Inspector of Prisons in 2022. I have also had the opportunity to raise the issue in face-to-face meetings with every politician who has held the position of Minister for Justice over the past four years. However, we have yet to see a Minister grasp the nettle of resolving the crisis engulfing the prison system with the requisite degree of bold political action.”

“I fully endorse the view recently expressed by the Executive Secretary of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture that the inhuman and degrading conditions in our prisons could easily lead the European Court of Human Rights to find Ireland in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights”, Mr Kelly said.

The Annual Report records that the Inspectorate enjoyed the usual excellent level of cooperation from the Irish Prison Service during its 2025 follow-up inspection of Mountjoy Prison and unannounced inspections of Castlerea and Wheatfield Prisons. Unfortunately, towards the end of 2025, the unblemished cooperation record of the Irish Prison Service was marred by attempts to impose constraints on the OIP’s operational autonomy during an announced thematic inspection of the treatment of older people living in prison.

This ultimately led to the suspension of that thematic inspection, and the Chief Inspector issued a Statutory Notice of Concern to the Director General of the Irish Prison Service, which is appended to the Annual Report.

Commenting on this development, Chief Inspector Mark Kelly said:

“Until very recently, my Office has enjoyed excellent cooperation from the Irish Prison Service, as is required by the Prisons Act, including unfettered access to all parts of all prisons. I am confident that this little local difficulty will be resolved through mature dialogue with the Director General of the IPS in advance of our next unannounced inspection”.

More generally, the Inspectorate will continue to engage with Government, senior officials, civil society and international partners, including the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), focusing on the need to implement long-standing national and international recommendations to improve the situation in Ireland’s prisons.

The Annual Report 2025 is available on the Inspectorate’s website at: www.oip.ie :

ENDS

Note to Editors:

The Office of the Inspector of Prisons is a statutory body, independent in how it carries out its work, set up under the Prisons Act 2007.

The law underpinning the role of Chief Inspector of Prisons is set out in Part 5, Sections 30 to 32 of the Prisons Act 2007. Section 30 provides for the appointment of the Chief Inspector, Section 31 sets out the functions of the Chief Inspector and Section 32 specifies the requirement to submit an Annual Report to the Minister for Justice, by 31 March in any year. The Inspectorate’s Annual Report for 2025 was submitted to the Minister on 31 March 2026.

Under Section 31 of the Act, the Chief Inspector of Prisons is obliged to carry out regular inspections of prisons and for this purpose may: at any time enter any prison or any part of a prison, request and obtain from the Governor a copy of any books, records, other documents or extracts from such documents, and, in the course of an inspection or arising out of an inspection bring any issues of concern to the notice of the Governor of the prison concerned, the Director General of the Irish Prison Service or the Minister as the Chief Inspector considers appropriate.

The Chief Inspector may, and must if he receives a request from the Minister, investigate any matter arising out of the management or operation of a prison and shall submit to the Minister a report on any such investigation.

Governors, prison officers, other persons employed in prisons and prisoners, must as far as reasonably practicable, comply with any request for information that the Chief Inspector may make in the performance of his functions.

Since 2012, the Chief Inspector has also been obliged to investigate the circumstances of all deaths in prison custody and those within one month of temporary release from custody. To date in 2026, there have been eighteen deaths falling within the Inspectorate’s mandate, all of which are being independently investigated. This exceeds the total number of deaths in prison custody in 2025 (fourteen).

In addition to the legislative authority derived from the Act, the Chief Inspector has specified functions under Prison Rules 2007-2013 in relation to the Irish Prison Service Prisoner Complaints Procedure (Rule 57B) and letters from prisoners (Rule 44 (1) (h)).

It is anticipated that, in the near future, the Inspectorate will become the Office of the Chief Inspector of Places of Detention, with an expanded remit as the National Preventive Mechanism for the justice sector under the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Torture (OPCAT). New legislation – the Inspection of Places of Detention Bill – will render it unlawful to fail to cooperate with the Chief Inspector. This legislation is listed for priority publication in the Government’s Legislation Programme for Summer 2026.

For further information, please see: www.oip.ie