Warning against closing centres for ex-offenders

The Department of Justice confirmed yesterday it was withdrawing funding for the Harristown House addiction and counselling centre in Castlerea, Co Roscommon.

It is also cutting funding for the Kazelain project in Sligo which provides accommodation for former offenders and homeless men.

A spokesman for Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern said the decision to close both services followed reviews which highlighted poor value for money and programme outcomes.

He insisted the closures were not as a result of spending cut-backs

"We're living in straitened times," the spokesman said.

"If in an independent report someone finds that a service is badly managed, not offering value for money and should be closed down, it would be a dereliction of our duty to ignore that."

However, support groups, unions and politicians criticised the move, and argued it would cost the State far more than it hoped to save.

"The department is effectively consigning people who may have been helped by these initiatives to lives of addiction, criminality and death," said Peter Byrne, a former patient of Harristown House who is now an addiction counsellor.

Harristown House, an addiction centre beside Castlerea Prison, has a staff of 20, and is funded by the Probation and Welfare Service at an annual cost of €475,000.

The consultants' report on which the decision to close the centre is based acknowledges that the concept of the service is valued by the judiciary, probation services and clients.

The Praxis report also notes that the centre has a 65 per cent success rate in treating addiction and tackling crime, and that residents were very positive about the service.

However, it concludes there are serious indications the organisation has become "dysfunctional" in terms of human resources, value for money and quality of service.

It found that the centre as it currently stands is no longer viable and should be closed down to allow for a "period of reflection".

However, Impact union's assistant general secretary Denis Rohan said the closure was "ludicrous". He said the union would seek a reversal of the decision in discussions with the department.

Council for the West chairman Seán Hannick questioned the rationale for "targeting yet another valuable project in the west for funding cuts".

In Sligo, the board of the Kazelain project, which houses 10 men and has eight full-time and five part-time staff, has also been informed that the facility will close at the end of November.

Board member Gabrielle Finan said as a result of the decision the residents would be homeless from the end of next month.

The department said the centre had received over €1 million in grant aid over the past three years, and said funding of this order "must be subject to stringent value-for-money criteria".

It said the Probation Service was working with management and residents to find alternative accommodation for the men. One resident, who said he felt like "I had lost a member of my family" when he heard the news, questioned the logic of the decision, given that it costs over €100,000 to keep someone in prison for a year.

Since it was set up in Sligo 5½ years ago, Kazelain has provided accommodation for an estimated 80 men, the majority of them ex-offenders who were estranged from the families.

It was founded by a local nun, the late Sister Marie Finan, who died in 2004.

Source: CARL O'BRIEN, LORNA SIGGINS and MARESE McDONAGH, The Irish Times, 09/10/2008