"As you can imagine, you've got 20 parking spaces, and we come along and say we're going to take out two of them or something like that to give spaces for people on bikes, it doesn't go down particularly well."
The Irish Prison Service had asked the government to revisit the policy, given more serious high-risk offenders had to be released early to make the space.
With Covid-19 restrictions banning outsiders entering Dublin prisons, outreach groups such as the Solas Project and Release are writing letters to inmates as a way to stay in touch.
