Senior officials are unhappy that pictures of inmates have been sold to tabloid newspapers and feel that the regime at the Dochas Centre is too lax.

Ireland's most notorious female offenders . . . including Catherine Nevin, the Mulhall sisters and Kelly Noble . . . are serving sentences in the stateof-the-art jail.

Pictures of Nevin taken with a camera phone appeared in a newspaper last month. The following week photographs of the so-called 'Scissor Sisters', Linda and Charlotte Mulhall, were published in the same newspaper. Two other inmates were also able to apply for jobs with phone sex lines and sent pictures of themselves posing in lingerie which were taken in their cells.

One senior source said: "We cannot tolerate the women posing for pictures which are then being sold to newspapers.

That is just not acceptable.

Obviously having inmates trying to get work on sex lines from jail is not on either, and this type of behaviour cannot be allowed to continue."