O'Donnell v High Court of the Republic of Ireland [2022] EWHC 458 (Admin)

The case: This is an appeal in an extradition case. Dr Jeremy Berman, consultant forensic psychiatrist, provided the Court with an expert report in which he mentioned a press article from the Irish Times, dated 23 March 2021, entitled "Gardai in three-hour standoff with staff at gates of Central Mental Hospital" and he provided a paper by G. Gulati and B.D. Kelly from the Irish Medical Journal, published (as Mr Hearn told me) on 14 March 2018, entitled "Diversion of Mentally Ill Offenders from the Criminal Justice System in Ireland: Comparison with England and Wales". The IMJ Paper describes the "Central Mental Hospital" ("CMH") as the sole secure hospital to which remand prisoners can, legally and directly, be diverted from an Irish prison. In relation to diversion and sentenced prisoners, the IMJ Paper describes the "limited access to secure beds in Ireland" which "impacts on the availability of treatment", observing that "a lack of Intensive Care Regional Units (ICRU) in Ireland … impacts negatively on psychiatric diversion from … custody in Ireland". The "three-hour standoff" described in the Irish Times Article involved a remand prisoner suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, whom a court (in mid-June 2021) had ordered be taken to CMH for treatment. The Irish Times reported that the "lack of beds in the CMH has been a serious issue for many years", that there was a typical waiting list of "20-30 prisoners waiting on a bed there at any time", and that the CMH had said it was at "100 per cent bed occupancy" and that "Covid-19 had negatively impacted capacity". 

There was also before the Court evidence of an ongoing medical investigation, conducted at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, into the question of whether the Claimant may have early onset dementia. 

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