Limerick Prison spends over €10,000 on footballs

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

listermint wrote: »

Okay, so it were back to the 'the other department get away with it so why cant we'

TBH this view doesnt cut it with me. Im not taking anything out on prisonsers but spending 10K on such a small amount of individuals is illogical. I dont know how you could reason this.

I mean we had 1000 Pupils in our school back in the day and we had the same 10 footballs for years, maybe replacing 2 a year.

and sod your nonsense about family or whatever but if one of my family ended up in limerick prison then they would have to deal with the conseqences of their actions. Alas my i was fortunate enough that my parents were brought up right as was their parents as was i.

Anyway back on point. If a ball is lost the prisoners have to buy their own, dont they get an allowance of some sort for work?

Why is a benefit to working not introduced or should we just have the same old same old hand outs ?

Nothing wrong with that - they'll make sure they don;t burst so easily if they have to pay for them themselves.

Althoguh I think you'll find most of the posters defending the prisons are defending them more from the forced-hard-labour-bread-and-water-crew.

Odysseus

Ikky Poo2 wrote: »

Nothing wrong with that - they'll make sure they don;t burst so easily if they have to pay for them themselves.

Althoguh I think you'll find most of the posters defending the prisons are defending them more from the forced-hard-labour-bread-and-water-crew.

Well that would be my position, especially if the "hard liners" get their info from the media and have never seen the inside of a prison. I'm all for punishment we also need rehab too, all stick and no carrot gets us no where.

stovelid

grenache wrote: »

Au contraire, mon ami.

My heart Flutt-ered a little on reading that,

Speaking a fully paid up specimen of John Q Taxpayer, that is.

D1stant

“They have proper footballs and basketballs for the indoor games in the gym but the balls they use out in the yard aren’t the best. I don’t think Ronaldo would be happy with them. They are the light plastic yellow balls you might see on the beach. You’d get them in a pound shop. You’d be embarrassed to bring one home to your kid,” said the source, adding that some of the footballs might be being burst deliberately as prisoners are unhappy with the quality"

WTFF?

Is Limerick Prison the stealth high performance centre for 2016 Olympics?

More interesting question is why this happened

"They showed that the spend on footballs at Limerick Prison was €5,854 in 2010 and jumped to €10,339 last year"

Shatter Island.

ArmaniJeanss

Figures don't really add up if its purely for footballs.
I'm guessing that Prisoner Officer X made 60 trips for footballs, and the newspapers have decided that thats 60 hours at €40 an hour wages, plus some sort of mileage allowance for the roundtrip.
I'd say the actual footballs are a minority of the €10K estimate spend.

ArmaniJeanss

SniperSight wrote: »

I'm human too, the government don't buy me footballs, so I don't see how that arguement washes!! Its supposed to be fu*king prison, not a bleedin' holiday camp!!

You should never book the AH weekend away trip if you think the presence of a football = holiday camp.

phasers

They should get the inmates involved in athletics instead, save a bit of money on materials in the long run. I'm sure the pole vault would be wildly popular.

Kimbot

Ikky Poo2 wrote: »

The article wrote:

... They are the light plastic yellow balls you might see on the beach. You’d get them in a pound shop. You’d be embarrassed to bring one home to your kid,” said the source...

So... 10,339 euro, on plastic yellow balloon-footballs... and the only got 700 of them...?

No, the article says that for 10,339 you can buy approx 700 ball's in a shop. If you divide 10,339 by700 it will give you a price of 14.77 per ball and it's safe to assume that the ball that the editor is referring to would be a leather ball at approx €15 each. Also the mention of fifa approved would lead you to believe the writer is talking about leather balls.

The prisoners use a combination of "Cup Champion" and another brand of plastic football so they would easily get a lot more than 700 football's... also the money spent could still have 50% of those balls in storage for this year.

BraziliaNZ

listermint wrote: »

if one of my family ended up in limerick prison then they would have to deal with the conseqences of their actions. Alas my i was fortunate enough that my parents were brought up right as was their parents as was i

Things happen that aren't planned sometimes, to the best of people.

SniperSight

ArmaniJeanss wrote: »

You should never book the AH weekend away trip if you think the presence of a football = holiday camp.

Well if I had said that 1 football equals a holiday camp, then maybe there might be something to your post. Maybe read over my post again and don't cherry pick to make a point.
Free tv, footballs, gym and pocket money may not seem like a holiday camp for the normal person, but for the scumbags that frequent the place its not exactly a deterrent.

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

jonny24ie wrote: »

No, the article says that for 10,339 you can buy approx 700 ball's in a shop. If you divide 10,339 by700 it will give you a price of 14.77 per ball and it's safe to assume that the ball that the editor is referring to would be a leather ball at approx €15 each. Also the mention of fifa approved would lead you to believe the writer is talking about leather balls.

The prisoners use a combination of "Cup Champion" and another brand of plastic football so they would easily get a lot more than 700 football's... also the money spent could still have 50% of those balls in storage for this year.

Surely, the plastic pound-shop jobs are not 15 euro...? Open to correction here, but I was assuming they meant the really light balloon-type balls...

Kimbot

Ikky Poo2 wrote: »

Surely, the plastic pound-shop jobs are not 15 euro...? Open to correction here, but I was assuming they meant the really light balloon-type balls...

Not they are only like 2 or 3 euro at most. I was saying that a leather fifa approved ball would be 15 and they don't use them in the prisons so its a lot more than 700 balls either way.

some random drunk

And it's not just Limerick Prison....

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0726/1224320827984.html

OVER €80,000 SPENT ON PRISON FOOTBALLS

THE IRISH Prison Service spent more than €80,000 on footballs over the last two years, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter has said.

More than €10,000 was spent on balls at both Cork Prison and Limerick Prison. The spend on footballs increased by 27 per cent last year to €45,702, and this did not include Shelton Abbey in Co Wicklow or Castlerea Prison in Co Roscommon (where €3,956 was spent on footballs a year earlier), as the figures were not available.


A spokesman for the Irish Prison Service said the organisation could not say how many balls the money had been used to buy.


The prison population stood at some 4,400 inmates yesterday. If each football was given a nominal value of €10, the amount spent suggests that, on average, one could be bought for almost every prisoner each year.

From the Irish Examiner

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/footballs-for-prisoners-cost-taxpayers-80k-in-past-2-years-201903.html

Footballs for prisoners cost taxpayers €80k in past 2 years

Figures from Prison Service show the cost of new balls has increased from almost €36,000 in 2010 to nearly €46,000 last year.

Fine Gael’s Denis Naughten slammed the expenditure as "bizarre" and said it was another example of "wanton waste" in the public service.

A breakdown of the football budget shows:

€19,691 spent in Cloverhill prison (€12,431 in 2010 and €7,260 in 2011);

€18,819 in Cork prison (€8,776 in 2010 and €10,043 in 2011);

€16,193 in Limerick prison (€5,854 in 2010 and €10,339 in 2011),

€5,876 in Mountjoy prison (€436 in 2010 and €5,440 in 2011),

Its an absolute fcuking disgrace in my opinion. I wouldn't begrudge the prisoners a couple of balls a year, but how the Irish Prison Service can possibly justify the amount of money spent is beyond me.

Son Of A Vidic

D1stant wrote: »

"They showed that the spend on footballs at Limerick Prison was €5,854 in 2010 and jumped to €10,339 last year"

Which leads one to believe that there must have been a dramatic increase in prisoner drug use. Hence the need for more footballs, to get orders and supplies over and back across the prison walls.