The drug-related death of Paul Kelly in Mountjoy Prison raises many serious questions for the Irish Prison Service, writes Conor Lally, Crime Correspondent
Jackie Kelly sighs wearily as she flicks through the remains of her only son's life. She has a folder from the Coroner's Court containing a copy of his post-mortem, a raft of legal letters and Garda witness statements. The folder documents her son Paul's descent into prison drug use culminating in his death at the age of 22.
But she has a second folder that she says represents his life of achievements before he took the wrong turns that led him to prison and into an early grave.
There are pages taken from the junior soccer and junior GAA pages of the tabloid newspapers. They tell tales of him scoring winning goals for his school and clubs in Parnell Park, Croke Park and a host of soccer grounds.
There are pictures of him as a scrawny 12-year-old dressed in a singlet and boxing gloves as he prepares to enter the ring at the Dublin Championships in the city's National Stadium.
"I remember, coming up to the Dublin Championships, he'd eat only boiled chicken because he was in training," his mother says. "He wouldn't even eat an Easter egg for years because it was too close to the championships."
SHE RECALLS SATURDAY mornings on the GAA pitches across west Dublin shouting at the referee to blow his whistle for full time when her son's team, Quarryvale St Laurence's of Clondalkin, were ahead. His talent was spotted early and he was invited to join other clubs including Round Towers in his native Clondalkin and Good Counsel in Drimnagh.
He loved horses too and once appeared in a BBC documentary, Urban Cowboys, which featured young boys who kept the animals on the working-class estates of Dublin.
Kelly left St Kevin's Community School on the Fonthill Road, Clondalkin, close to his home at nearby Greenfort Gardens, after his Junior Cert to serve his time as a bricklayer. By the time he was 17 or 18 he had discovered discos and girls and drifted away from sport. At 19 he and his girlfriend Michelle had a baby daughter, Antonia, and, according to his mother he "really grew up".
But then he made the uncharacteristic move that was to destroy his life. In the early hours of December 6th, 2002, he and four others decided to carry out an armed robbery. They went to Clancy Barracks, at Islandbridge in Dublin, where the Pennies From Heaven charity was storing punt coins it had collected from the public after the Euro changeover.
All five men were masked and one was armed with a sawn-off shotgun. They tied up two security guards and escaped with coins valued at almost €135,000.
Jackie Kelly says she could not believe what her son had done.
"He said: 'Ma, I was just coming home [ from the pub] and the lads pulled up in the van and with a few drinks on me I just got in and went.' It was the sorriest thing he ever did." All five raiders were from Clondalkin and were later arrested based on intelligence received by gardaí. They were brought to court in November 2003. Kelly pleaded guilty and was remanded in custody until he was convicted of aggravated burglary and sentenced in April 2005. He got six years, two of which were suspended.
By the time the matter reached the courts, he had developed a cocaine problem. He sought treatment for his addiction and his mother says he was drug free when he was remanded in custody to Cloverhill in late 2003. He underwent drug testing at Cloverhill, the results of which have been seen by The Irish Times and which confirm he was drug free. On conviction, he was transferred to Mountjoy.
His mother believes that from that point the Irish Prison Service has serious questions to answer about her son's time in custody.
She points out that he had never been in trouble before and had never been to prison, facts confirmed to The Irish Times by security sources. She says that, having carried out only one serious crime, admittedly a violent one involving a firearm, the system should have been able to assist him in putting his life back together. Instead, he found a system in chaos that was stacked against him.
His experiences in prison were marked by drug abuse, violence, a death threat and ultimately his own death.
Jackie Kelly says her son confided in her during her early visits to Mountjoy that he was back using drugs.
"Hash - he said it was to help him sleep," she says. "He seemed to be able to get it anywhere in Mountjoy".
He then began using tranquillisers and overdosed on the drugs in June 2005 when he was rushed to the Mater Hospital semi-conscious. The overdose was not life-threatening and he was back in jail after a short hospital stay.
But despite being his next of kin, Jackie Kelly said she was never told of the overdose.
"I only found out about it when I got his medical records after he died the next year. I think he was probably too embarrassed to tell me. But if the prison had contacted me I could have tried to get through to him." Five months later, in September 2005, he overdosed on tranquillisers again.
This time it was more serious. He was found unconscious by his cellmate, was rushed to the Mater and almost died.
"They had to shock him to keep him alive," his mother says.
When she raised the origins of the drugs with the prison authorities she was accused of supplying them to him, an accusation she vehemently denies.
Before he was discharged from hospital, Jackie Kelly, after taking advice from a drugs counsellor, became fearful that after having been on morphine in hospital, her son might have withdrawal symptoms and begin abusing heroin when back in jail.
She contacted Mountjoy and secured a place for him in the prison's medical unit.
He was admitted for a six-week stay. But three weeks into the stint, Kelly and a number of other prisoners sourced a bottle of vodka. He tested positive for alcohol, lost his place in the unit and was sent back to the prison proper.
JACKIE KELLY ACCEPTS her son acted of his own free will. But she questions how inmates with a drug and overdose history were able to source vodka in a drug-free, secure medical unit in a prison setting.
A friend of Kelly's took his own life in Clondalkin and he was refused temporary release to attend the funeral. In mid-January 2006, he became involved in a fist fight with a prisoner in Mountjoy. Arising from this, a well-known gangland criminal from west Dublin issued a death threat against him. He was transferred for his own safety to a holding cell in the basement of the prison.
These basement holding cells were never meant to house inmates overnight and were intended merely to secure them for a short time as they were being committed to the prison. The growing violence in the prison system meant prison staff were forced to use the cells as a protection unit. Chronic overcrowding means there is no alternative.
Kelly was housed in a communal basement cell for six days. Like the prisoners he was sharing with, he slept on a mattress on the floor. The group were expected to defecate, urinate and take their meals in the same cell.
His mother visited him during the six-day period and says he looked dirty.
He did not appear to have access to clean clothes or shower facilities. "He told me there were cockroaches running around, that it was filthy, cold, damp," she recalls. He died in the same clothes he had been wearing for his six days in the basement.
On Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 he was transferred back to the prison proper. He was put into a two-man cell, number 29 on D1 wing, with another prisoner, Dean Brazil from Coolock. Because of Kelly's overdose history and because Brazil was a new committal, both men were placed under special observation.
Their cell was checked every 15 minutes from the time it was locked at 7.32pm.According to a statement given to gardaí by Brazil, the two men watched Coronation Street in their cell, followed by Ricki Lake and smoked three cannabis joints. Brazil told gardaí his cellmate had the drugs.
Kelly appears to have fallen asleep fully clothed lying on top of the bedclothes in his bunk. Brazil woke at around 2.30am. The TV was still on and he heard Kelly snoring.
When the cell door was opened for breakfast at 8.15am, prison officer Senan O'Dwyer asked both men whether they wanted food. Brazil replied that he did not, while Kelly did not answer. The door was locked and Brazil went back to sleep. It was unlocked again at 9.20am and Brazil was told to go and consult staff about his medical requirements, as is normal with new committals.
The door was locked again and reopened minutes later, when Brazil returned. It was at this point that he noticed Kelly was unconscious. He called for the prison officers, one of whom, assistant chief officer Marianne Kennedy, placed Kelly in the recovery position. She said she thought a medic arrived at around 9.40am, between 15 and 20 minutes after Kelly's condition was first noticed.
It appears no medic was on duty on D1 wing at the time. In her statement to gardaí, Kennedy said: "This morning we had no medic so a staff member handed out medication."
Kelly was rushed by ambulance to the Mater Hospital but was dead on arrival.
A post-mortem found a cocktail of drugs in his system including cannabis, traces of heroin and methadone and sedative drugs. Deputy State Pathologist Dr Michael Curtis last week told an inquest into Kelly's death that the dead man had lain unconscious from drug intoxication for several hours before bronchopneumonia set in.
THE INQUEST JURY recorded a verdict of death by misadventure under the direction of the coroner, Dr Brian Farrell. He said it was an accidental overdose and that Kelly was not suicidal and had not intended to harm himself.
Prison officer Darren O'Donoghue, who carried out the observation checks during the night Kelly died, told the inquest that while he was aware Kelly was under special observation, he had no idea why.
Kennedy conceded the reason for the special observation was not recorded anywhere. "Sometimes it's written down, sometimes it's not," she said.
The inquest also heard that none of the prison officers who attended to Kelly had received any training in recognising when a prisoner had taken an overdose.
In response to a query from The Irish Times, The Irish Prison Service said it must respect the privacy of individual inmates and for that reason could not comment on the specifics of Kelly's case.
But Jackie Kelly believes the events of the morning her son died reveal "shocking" lapses in prison procedures and staff training.
When word of her son's death began to spread in the jail, prisoners from Clondalkin began using their smuggled mobile phones to contact people from the area and pass on the news.
Kelly's girlfriend Michelle was wheeling the couple's daughter in a buggy through Liffey Valley Shopping Centre when a woman she knew stopped her and told her Paul was dead. She rushed in panic to Jackie Kelly's place of work in the shopping centre.
Both women rang the prison in the hope the news would be dismissed as rumour by the prison authorities. The prison was unable to confirm the death and told the two women to go to the Mater.
"I got to the Mater and I was brought into a room. I'm saying to myself, 'if they're bringing me into a room he must be alright'," Jackie Kelly recalls.
"A nurse came in and I said 'Paul Kelly?'. She said: 'Yeah, but there's two Paul Kellys and we don't know if he's yours'." "Then she brought me out the back. I'm thinking, 'Jesus, where am I going?' At that stage I was hanging on to her, squeezing her arm, because I could see a sign saying 'Mortuary'. I said, 'No, I'm not going in there, he can't be in there'. But they opened the door and there was my Paul laid out."