Yes it's a dreadful situation all round.
Women spend more time locked in their cells so the men can shower, exercise and socialise without physically endangering the women.
The men hurl obscene abuse at the women every time they have to walk by. The vast majority of the women will have already been victims of male violence so they are daily retraumatised.
If the women refer to one of the men as a man, or say 'he' then they are sanctioned. This is institutional gaslighting on an Orwellian scale.
There are several reports that the men and women are not always kept separate. My understanding is that in these situations the man is accompanied by two extra prison officers.
Limerick women's wing is very small, it holds 28 prisoners. Three of them are currently men, so that's about one man to every eight women. In a facility that is supposed to be single sex.
If it's anything like the UK, the women's prison estate will already be an afterthought because it's so tiny and the prisoners are more likely to harm themselves than each other or the guards. Think about all the extra resources that are required to keep women safe when men are housed in their prisons. Think about how much that costs and how much better it could be if that money was spent on the women.
And it's a dreadful situation for BK and the other two men. Women's prisons don't have different security categories because the women's estate is so small and vanishingly few female prisoners require high security, so all that can be provided for these men in a women's prison is solitary and/or occasional mixing with two extra guards (which raises all sorts of questions about the non-consensual use of women prisoners to validate the gender identity claims of the men).
Solitary sends people mad. Keeping already mad people like BK in solitary sends them even madder. There is a high security men's prison in Ireland which surely has the best resources and expertise in the country to look after extremely dangerous male prisoners like BK while protecting their human rights.
If there is a man in a women's prison for tax fraud who is quietly sitting in solitary causing no problem to the women then he also should not be there. Since when was it acceptable to keep non-violent offenders in long term segregation? The male estate has high, medium and low security facilities. If he's that harmless then a low security facility in the male estate would be far more suitable regardless of his gender identity.
It seems to me that a fuckton of resources are being thrown at keeping men in women's prisons which harms everyone's article 3 rights, just so the computer says yes, you are a woman. The whole thing is obscene.