Too many people are kept in their cells between 19 and 24 hours a day, says chief prison inspector

When Mark was sent to Mountjoy Prison for driving offences in 2019, he felt he needed protection inside from some other prisoners.

He didn’t realise, he said on Thursday, that he was choosing between safety from danger and something just as destructive.  

Locked up in isolation for between 22 and 24 hours a day, his mental health rapidly declined. The pandemic was bleak for those incarcerated, he says. Out-of-cell time could be minimal.

He began self-harming, he said, and eventually attempted to take his own life.

Mark, who asked for just his first name to be used for fear that being fully identified here could hurt his job prospects, said that the environment he found himself in prison did nothing for rehabilitation.

In Mountjoy Prison, the number of prisoners on restricted regimes – which overlaps with, but doesn't map directly onto, what is known in other jurisdictions as solitary confinement – hovers at around 50 percent, says Mark Kelly, chief inspector of prisons in Ireland.

It's the extreme end of restricted regimes, and solitary confinement, that is the most troubling.

Under the United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules, "prolonged solitary confinement" is when a prisoner is locked up, without meaningful human contact, for 22 or more hours a day, and for more than 15 days in a row. The UN considers this akin to torture.

But across Irish prisons, there are people who get out of their cells for as little as 15 minutes a day, says the latest Office of the Inspector of Prisons Annual Report, which was published this month.

"While the Mandela Rules are not legally binding in Ireland, they inform Irish Prison Service policy development,” a spokesperson for the Irish Prison Service (IPS) said on Thursday.

The negative impact these regimes of prolonged solitary confinement have on the mental wellbeing of incarcerated people is hard to quantify, says Andy O’Hara, co-ordinator with UISCE, the national advocacy group for people who use drugs.

He has spoken in the last two days with several formerly incarcerated people who he works with – the majority of whom were in for non-violent offences – about the effect these regimes had on them, he said on Thursday.

Coming back into the community, after life on restricted regime, they each found that their ability to communicate with other people had deteriorated, says O’Hara.

For some, relationships with partners and even children collapsed after their release, he says.

“They were so used to being on their own that they actually struggled to build and maintain relationships with family," he says.

People for whom anger issues had never been a problem before found themselves irritable, sometimes even aggressive, over simple things, he says.

Society and prisons have to understand there is a cost when you deny people their human rights, he says.

“I don't just mean in the immediate sense,” says O'Hara. “This creates trauma. This creates mental health issues. This creates problems when people are treated poorly.”

The impacts ripple through the community, he says.

“The first thing you do is you internalise it and whether you self-medicate or whether you just suffer with your mental health, but the next port of call after that is to impact family and the community," he said.

“There's a social cost and a community cost to when we treat people in a particular way,” he says.

An incomplete picture

The majority of people on heavily restricted regimes in Ireland have requested it, on the grounds of personal safety.

Rule 63 of the Prison Rules 2007 allows a prisoner to be separated from others who may pose a significant risk to them, at their own request or by a governor, based on information from An Garda Síochána or other intelligence sources.

“Prisoners on Rule 63 may associate with others in compatible risk groups and are therefore not necessarily considered to be in solitary confinement,” the IPS spokesperson said.

In the past, the IPS has published a quarterly “Census of Restricted Regimes Reports” with figures on the use of such regimes. But its most recent was in July 2025.

Work is ongoing on the next, which will be published when finalised, said the IPS spokesperson.

The quarterly figures available though, which cover from July 2o22 to July 2025, show fluctuations quarter by quarter for those locked up for more than 22 hours.

The figures do not reflect whether someone has been under such a regime for longer than 15 days.

Overall, the number had risen from 755 in April 2025 to 810 in July 2025 – up by 7 percent.

Of those 810 prisoners in July 2025, 779 were on a restricted regime for protection reasons, as per Rule 63. And of those, 730 were so at their own request.

The number of people on 22-hour restricted regime was 216. Meanwhile, there were 97 people on 23-hour restricted regime. The number on a 24-hour lockdown was six.

But these figures don’t paint a complete picture, says Kelly, chief prison inspector.

For people on Rule 63, something called a Restricted Regimes Record Book is kept, he says,

It’s meant to include a high degree of detail about the daily lives of each and every person who is on Rule 63, he says.

What the inspectors found in Mountjoy, which is common across the prison estate, Kelly says, is that the book only records what prisoners on Rule 63 are offered – not what they take up.

So the IPS figures for July 2025 mean, really, that 216 people on 22-hour regime were offered up to two hours out of their cell every day.

If there's no accurate recording of whether or not they actually take up that offer, nobody has a really complete picture of what's happening, he says.

“And in reality, what we find from visiting these places, also talking to prisoners, is that after a while on this regime, there tends to be people who lose the will to leave their cell and go and take out their exercise," says Kelly.

“Because their lives are so restricted that after a certain time, they don't really see the point in doing it, and that's quite often not being recorded," Kelly says.

Record keeping needs to be improved, he says.

That way, staff could identify people who “almost become hermits in their own cells”, says Kelly. That should indicate a need for more active engagement with that person to encourage them to leave their cell or to engage with others, he says.

“The pattern is very clear that if you end up on Rule 63, you are likely to have really quite a limited life and to have rather little time out of your cell,” he says.

According to the IPS spokesperson: “The Irish Prison Service is committed to continually strengthening the consistency of record‑keeping and reporting on restricted regimes across the estate, supported by the new national policy and standard operating procedures approved in 2026.”

So, are there people being locked down for over 22 hours a day, without meaningful contact, for more than 15 days in a row, as warned against by the Mandela Rules?

“Absolutely, there are,” Kelly says.

There is also a subset of prisoners, classified as Protection of All Others (PAO), who are even worse off.

This is a small number of people for whom it would be unsafe to be in contact with any other prisoner, he says.

“These might be people, for example, who have given evidence against gangland figures and done a plea deal in exchange for a reduced sentence,” he says.

They could be former police or prison officers, he says.

These prisoners can end up with as little as 15 minutes a day out of their cells for prolonged periods of time, he says. “That's a real concern.”

Protection not punishment

While prisoners might be put on restrictive regime for their own protection, it doesn’t validate only letting them out of the cells for an hour or two, or less, a day, says Kelly.

On the contrary, the regime should be better for people in this situation, given their lives are going to be more limited, he says.

“They should be offered additional activities or additional visits to compensate for the more restricted conditions under which they are held,” he says.

That echoes what was in the July 2025 report by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, after its members visited Ireland.

Confinement to a cell for 21, 22, or even 23 and more hours each day may have “an extremely damaging effect on the mental, somatic and social health of the prisoner”, it says.

“Therefore, while pursuing their goal of ensuring that all prisoners can serve their sentences under safe conditions, the Irish authorities should minimise the negative effects of such segregation, especially where it continues for more than a few weeks (as in the majority of cases),” the report says.

“Additional measures must be taken in order to provide them with appropriate conditions and treatment; access to activities, educational courses and sport should be feasible,” it says.

The report says that it “underlined the need for change in 2019 and was disappointed to find a similar situation in 2024 in these respects.”

Kelly says the prevalence of restricted regimes is one of the major systemic issues that remains unaddressed in the Irish prison system.

“And to some extent, as an issue, it's tended to be masked or overshadowed by the issue of overcrowding that affects the prison system as a whole,” he says. “But it really is an absolutely critical issue.”

The IPS needs to invest far greater efforts in ensuring that people who, on first committal, are placed on Rule 63 are able to transition to more normal conditions and a more normal regime in a way that's actively managed and encouraged by prison staff, he says.

Mark, who was sent to Mountjoy in 2019 and was kept under a heavily restricted protection regime, says that in his experience, access to mental health and addiction supports were very, very limited.

He was released from prison 17 months ago and has been in recovery from addiction since, he says.

The report from the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment acknowledged that providing a meaningful regime for prisoners who feel they need protection from others is a “significant burden on prison management and IPS resources”.

“This is compounded by the sheer number of prisoners in the Irish prison estate needing protection, and puts a massive strain on the prison system as a whole,” it says.

The spokesperson for the prison service said there is extensive international research documenting the negative impact of prolonged confinement.

And that a “systematic review synthesising this research is currently being completed by a UCC researcher in collaboration with the Irish Prison Service”.

The IPS experiences staffing pressures at times, the spokesperson said.

The increase in the prison population has a direct impact on the operation of prisons, including the redeployment of staff for court escorts and hospital appointments, they said. “These can influence the delivery of certain activities.”

“However, prisons are required to meet the minimum out‑of‑cell time provided for in SI 276/2017 Prison (Amendment) Rules 2017] and regimes are managed to ensure compliance with the Prison Rules,” they said.

O’Hara, co-ordinator with UISCE, says that some of the formerly incarcerated people he works with tell him that they really struggled after life on restricted regime.

“You get out, you're just out there, and it's suck it up and get on with things,” he says. “There's no awareness from people that you're engaging with.”

One man told him that, after starting a job post-release, he soon found he simply couldn’t function in that environment.

That former prisoner told him that he felt prison had stripped him of his social skills and abilities.  

Another person O’Hara spoke to told him that, having not been into drugs before, he started using on the outside to cope with his experiences on restricted regime. “He said there was very little sympathy for him.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.