In 1973 the Provisional IRA hijacked a helicopter and instructed the pilot, at gunpoint, to fly into the exercise yard of Mountjoy and collect three of their comrades. This daring manoeuvre shaped the direction of David McDonald’s life, leading to the government’s decision to transform Portlaoise Prison into Ireland’s premier high-security facility.
McDonald, a native of the town, was immersed in the culture of the prison from an early age, and in 1989 he completed his probationary training for the prison service. Over the span of 30 years, McDonald varied his career by working in Mountjoy, the shame of the prison-break long forgotten, but which was then viewed by the novitiates as a “frightening place” that “reeked of organised chaos”; Portlaoise, which housed the majority of Ireland’s political prisoners, and was for a time “the most secure prison in Europe”; and finally the Midlands Prison, an advanced carceral facility that provided access to science labs, metalwork facilities, counselling rooms and, crucially, “in-cell sanitation”.
The latest in a series of first-hand accounts written by Irish prison staff like Philip Bray, John Cuffe and John Lonergan, Unlocked provides crucial insight into a social institution that is designed to be opaque. Every chapter contains a wealth of piquant facts and stories, like the requirement for prison officers to accompany Portlaoise’s “subversives” or political prisoners during their conjugal visits: “If a prisoner was meeting a wife or girlfriend, you were told to bring a newspaper with you into the visiting box. You would know what was coming…”
Despite his lifelong adherence to one career, McDonald has an outsider’s aptitude for observing the contradictory and sometimes unsavoury elements of the prison system. His matter-of-fact prose lingers, for instance, over the miserable conditions that prisoners diagnosed with AIDS were subject to during the 1990s, and he unflinchingly examines the extraordinarily punitive arrangements that were implemented for a group of hostage-takers: “We were slowly driving them mad,” he notes with disarming simplicity, “inflicting constant and relentless psychological damage”.
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Including several vignettes on household names like John Gilligan and Christy Kinahan, as well as an improvisatory history of the Operational Support Group (a cross-facility unit that targets prison contraband), McDonald has produced an illuminating testimony on the strange life of disciplinary institutions in Ireland.
