Yes or No Minister: The Importance of the Politician-Senior Civil Servant Dyad in Irish Prison Policy

• Published date: 01 March 2011
• Date: 01 March 2011
• Author: Mary Rogan
• DOI: 10.1177/0032885510389560
• Subject Matter: Articles

389560TPJ91110.1177/003288
5510389560RoganThe Prison Journal
© 2011 SAGE Publications
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Article
The Prison Journal
91(1) 32 –56
Yes or No Minister:
© 2011 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission:
The Importance of
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0032885510389560
http://tpj.sagepub.com
the Politician–Senior
Civil Servant Dyad in
Irish Prison Policy
Mary Rogan1
Abstract
Irish prison policy is notable for the absence of an ideological agenda driving
its direction and content. This article examines the impact of the relation-
ship between Minister for Justice, the member of Cabinet responsible for
the criminal justice system and prisons in Ireland, and the most senior civil
servant within that Department, in the creation of this policy landscape. The
Minister-Secretary General dyad in the area of Irish prison policy during the
early 1960s is explored in order to assess the importance of this relationship
in the formation of prison policy. This period was one of the few in Irish
penal history when momentum to change the prison system was evident. The
article draws on emerging scholarship on policy analysis within criminology.
It suggests that engagement with the policy-making process can provide
meaningful data to explain the nature of criminal justice policy.
Keywords
prison policy, criminal justice policy-making, penal-welfarism, penal history,
sociology of punishment
1Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland
Corresponding Author:
Mary Rogan, School of Criminology, Dublin Institute of Technology,
143-149 Rathmines Road, Dublin 6, Ireland
Email: mary.rogan@dit.ie

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Rogan
33
Penal Ideology in Ireland
It has been said that it is difficult to categorize, or even discern, a prevailing
ideology in Irish prison policy or in Irish crime control policy more generally.
Many of the most vividly punitive elements of contemporary penal adminis-
tration are not present. The rate of imprisonment in Ireland is 94 per 100,000,
behind many of its European counterparts and sitting around the lower end
of the middle tier of European countries. In a referendum in 2000, the
Constitution was amended to prevent the reintroduction of capital punish-
ment. That said, conditions in many of the state’s prisons are overcrowded
and “slopping out” remains a feature of daily life for around 30% of prisoners,
and there remains no provision to expunge convictions for any offences com-
mitted by adults (Irish Penal Reform Trust, 2010). There are plans to build
the first large prison in Ireland, although it appears the size of that prison—
up to four times as large as any current institution—was based on a ratio-
nale which emphasized economies of scale rather than an intention to
warehouse prisoners in austere and deliberately oppressive conditions
(Brangan, 2009). Indeed, those plans appear to have been stalled, if not derailed
given the current financial position of the state.
This picture of Irish prison policy, therefore, has a number of contradic-
tory elements, some which could be considered progressive and others less
so. Equally, the ideological basis for many of these developments is uncertain.
The penal ideology of Ireland is ill-defined and changeable. Neither punitive
nor more liberal sentiments are deeply embedded. The sensibilities which
make up Irish conceptions of prison policy have somewhat shallow roots,
giving rise to a form of prison policy which incorporates sometimes conflict-
ing penal approaches and objectives. Given this lack of an entrenched penal
ideology, particular incidents, events, and indeed people can have particu-
larly long-lasting and important effects on the nature of penal administration,
legislation governing the prison system, and the development of particular
aspects of prison policy.
Another feature of Irish prison policy relates to the manner in which
changes or key moments in that policy have come about and this is explained,
in part, by the varied and malleable nature of conceptions of the objectives of
punishment and the desired approach to prison policy. Historically, the prison
system has undergone long periods of political and administrative neglect,
punctuated by bouts of heightened interest and activity (O’Donnell, 2008;
Rogan, 2008a, 2009). At times this activity has centered on prisoners
allied to various incarnations of the Irish Republican Army. The death of an
IRA prisoner on hunger and thirst strike and after a prolonged period of

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34
The Prison Journal 91(1)
imprisonment in 1947 led to political pressure for penal reform and the
introduction of the Prison Rules 1947 (Rogan, 2008b). In the 1970s, the out-
break of violence in Northern Ireland also had an impact on the prison system
in the republic. The difficulties in housing politically motivated prisoners
along with a general increase in the prison population led to a period of crisis
management and a rapid, reactionary, and poorly thought out period of penal
expansion. In the 1990s, a program of prison building was again instigated.
This occurred shortly after official policy documents declared that imprison-
ment should be a measure of last resort and a cap placed on the prison popula-
tion (Department of Justice, 1994). The plans for increased prison places
were made in the context of a time of heightened political interest in the
prison system and in crime and against the backdrop of electoral competition
(Kilcommins, O’Donnell, O’Sullivan, & Vaughan, 2004). However, other
important factors in the formation of those plans were the improved eco-
nomic position of the state, an administrative appetite for large capital proj-
ects and the lingering effects and memory of times of severe overcrowding
and the use of temporary release as a mechanism to ease the pressure on
space. The plans themselves were based on rudimentary projections for the
prison population and were subject to a number of revisions, largely unsup-
ported by evidence of need (O’Donnell, 2004a).
In many respects, the nature and trajectory of Irish prison policy is similar
to that which has occurred in social policy more generally, including the areas’
health and education (Barrington, 1987). The Irish welfare state is notoriously
difficult to place in any of the standard categorizations of welfare regimes
(Carey, 2007; Cousins, 1997; Fanning, 2003; Korpi, 2002; National Economic
and Social Council, 2005). Its history is one of a slow and almost niggardly
development toward increased social provision. Catholic bodies and volun-
tary sector were furthermore heavily relied on by the state to provide vari-
ous services to its population, with the Catholic sector keen to maintain its
position in such provision (Foster, 1989). Many initiatives, such as the intro-
duction of the Children’s Allowance System were undertaken ad hoc, being
championed by individual reforming ministers, rather than being part of a
generalized political commitment to a particular conception of what social
policy should be designed to achieve (Cousins, 2003). Universalism is not a
feature of the Irish social welfare system, though provision for certain groups,
such as senior citizens, is comparatively generous. It has been said that
the Irish welfare state has a “mongrel” quality, with no particular ideology
present (National Economic and Social Council, 2005). In addition to this,
the Irish political system is similarly unusual and hard to classify according
to international typologies. In broad terms, a system of proportional

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Rogan
35
representation has led in recent decades to a series of coalition governments
in which the need for compromise, along with a clientilist approach, which
prioritizes the local over the national has given rise to a pragmatic form of
politics (Coakley, 2005; Lee, 1986), dominated by a party with widespread
appeal across classes and a flexible approach toward political philosophies.
In this field, also, there has been little in the way of ideological commitment
present.
Within the crime control realm, this pragmatic nature of Irish political
“ideology” has made it difficult to pinpoint overall trends or coherent motifs
across economics and social policy (Curry, 2003; O’Connell & Rottman,
1992). Instead, political agency, party politics, and a significant amount of
opportunism have operated to give such policies and their constituent ele-
ments, their particular complexion (O’Sullivan, 2004). This means that pol-
icy developments in a variety of areas cannot be considered manifestations of
a particular political philosophy. Instead, a confluence of individual and par-
ticularistic factors must be appraised. Across all these aspects of the social
and political context in which penal and other policies are made, the flexible
ad hoc and pragmatic approach has, it appears, operated to insulate Ireland
from some of the excesses associated with more recent crime control policies
in the Anglo-American world (Kilcommins et al., 2004).
The Influence of Ministers and Civil Servants
on the Formation of Prison Policy in Ireland
Another key consequence of this state of affairs is the subject of this article.
Without a strong ideological basis for policy, individuals with the power to
make changes affecting the prison system can have a particular significant
effect on the shape of prison policy. If those individuals so desire, they do
not need to fight with any particularly strong penal agenda or developed
...