Almost \u20ac19 million was paid in allowances to prison staff last year, including extra payments for operating tuck shops, wearing plain clothes, handling dogs, and answering telephones.<\/p>\n
Irish Prison Service figures show \u20ac64,000 was paid to 23 staff under a “tuck shop” allowance in 2025.<\/p>\n
Another \u20ac79,000 was provided in plain-clothes allowances to 185 employees, while 78 staff shared just over \u20ac12,000 in telephone payments.<\/p>\n
Dog-handling allowances worth \u20ac27,000 were paid to twenty workers, according to records released under FOI.<\/p>\n
The largest individual category was an operational allowance, which cost roughly \u20ac15.7 million and was shared among 3,684 staff.<\/p>\n
That works out at around \u20ac4,250 per employee per year, the data showed.<\/p>\n
Environment allowances were the next most expensive at almost \u20ac624,000 and were paid to 353 employees.<\/p>\n
These include payments for working at high-security Portlaoise Prison, reflecting the historical and additional dangers of dealing with paramilitary and gangland prisoners.<\/p>\n
Nurse officers received roughly \u20ac496,000 in allowances, with the money divided among 75 employees.<\/p>\n
There were also payments of more than \u20ac253,500 for court-escort duties and \u20ac175,000 in driving allowances.<\/p>\n
The driving payments were made to 978 members of staff, while a separate driving and handyman allowance cost almost \u20ac10,900.<\/p>\n
A total of \u20ac67,000 was spent on gate allowances, with another \u20ac68,000 paid under a category for reception duties.<\/p>\n
Thirteen staff shared more than \u20ac92,000 in unspecified miscellaneous allowances, an average of around \u20ac7,100 each.<\/p>\n
Nine employees received acting allowances totalling \u20ac117,000, equivalent to a per-person payment of almost \u20ac13,000.<\/p>\n
On-call allowances cost \u20ac68,000 and were paid to twelve staff, while 75 detail assistants shared payments worth just over \u20ac228,000.<\/p>\n
The figures also included a series of allowances for governors, assistant governors and chief officers.<\/p>\n
Assistant governor duty allowances cost almost \u20ac257,000, while a separate payment category for governors came to more than \u20ac263,000.<\/p>\n
Allowances for chief officer duties added a further \u20ac135,000 to the overall bill.<\/p>\n
The total cost of the allowance payments listed by the Irish Prison Service was around \u20ac18.8 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Almost \u20ac19 million was paid in allowances to prison staff last year, including extra payments for operating tuck…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565892,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60],"class_list":["post-565891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}