A social media user claimed on X, formerly Twitter, that “61% of all prisoners in Ireland are foreign nationals”.
The post also quoted figures which it claimed are from September 1 “this year” that 4,612 people are in Irish prisons, of which 2,814 are foreign nationals.
Evaluation
Several datasets from organisations including The Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics, which is also known by its French acronym SPACE, and the Irish Prison Service suggest the portion of foreign nationals in Irish prisons is considerably less than 20%.
The facts
The X user linked to a 2023 report from SPACE, but that report does not back up the post’s claims. The report presented data from January 31 2023, not September 1 2024, as the post discussed.
It showed that there were 4,432 inmates in Irish prisons on January 31 2023, of which 649 were foreign inmates, which equates to roughly 14.6%.
Furthermore, a table on page four of the report showed that the percentage of foreign inmates in the prison population on January 31 2023 was considered “low” in Ireland compared to the European average.
In the X post, there is also a claim that it costs 84,046 euros per year “to keep a prisoner”. That figure is also not taken from the SPACE report. On page 129 of the report, it mentions in Ireland the “average annual cost of an available, staffed prison space” during 2022 was 84,067 euros.
Both the 84,046 euro figure, and the social media user’s claim that there were 4,612 people in prison on September 1 of this year can be found on a page of the Irish Penal Reform Trust’s website. That page cites its sources as a document from the Irish Prison Service and a written answer to the Dail by the Minister of Justice. Neither source contains data on nationality.
The most recent data on the number of non-Irish nationals in custody is from September 2024. It shows that there were 856 people from a “Non Irish Nationality Group” out of 4,975 persons in custody as of September 30 2024. This equates to 17.2%.
The September 2024 data above was not yet available at the time of the post on social media.
The data from the Irish Prison Service for September 2023, however, reported that as of September 30 2023, there were 4,581 people in custody of which 681, or around 14.9%, were non-Irish nationals.
In response to other users, the poster said that the figure of “61% is based on people not born in Ireland, when you check the yearly stats”. The PA news agency could find no statistics which broke down the prison population by place of birth.
The Irish Prison Service told PA that it does not collect data on inmates’ place of birth.
Links
Irish Penal Reform Trust website (archived)
Prisoner population on September 1 2023 (archived)
Dail written answers (archived)
Monthly Information Note – September 2024 (archived)
Monthly Information Note – September 2023 (archived)