FIVE prisoners have to be placed in solitary confinement every day in Irish prisons because they're considered a danger to staff, other inmates or themselves.

Inmates had to be removed from the general population on 1,816 occasions last year according to detailed figures from the Irish Prison Service (IPS).

They said that a major rise in the use of "solitary" over the past two years was not related to chronic overcrowding within the prison system.

The IPS said that the majority of people were put in special observation cells for their own safety because they posed a risk to themselves or others.

However, campaigners have said that solitary confinement was still being used in some cases to house unruly or mentally-ill prisoners for weeks and even months.

Liam Herrick of the Irish Penal Reform Trust said: "It is an issue that persons who are determined a medical risk and need to be transferred to a hospital setting are being held in solitary confinement.

"There simply is not enough capacity in the Central Mental Hospital and people are often held in limbo. These are people that need hospital care and are not getting it. It is an extremely acute problem and the longer you leave people like this in a prison context, the worse they are likely to get.

"The second question is solitary confinement for security reasons. There will occasionally be instances where dangerous prisoners need to be held for short periods of time.

"Our problem is where people are kept in solitary for an extended period of time and don't have an appropriate review mechanism. There isn't any legal review system whereby they can have their continued detention questioned.

"There is no prison ombudsman and the only recourse that a prisoner has is to go to judicial review and take High Court proceedings. It's cracking a nut with a hammer."

The problem is most pronounced in Cloverhill and Mountjoy prisons, where an inmate is moved to solitary confinement every single day.