Purcell no stranger to ‘interesting times’

Though his name was not widely known beyond political, media and security circles until being thrust into the middle of the Garda eavesdropping and whistleblower political controversies last week, the secretary general of the Department of Justice Brian Purcell has lived in "interesting times".

He took the well-worn path to his current position as Alan Shatter’s top civil servant from the post of director general of the Irish Prison Service, as his predecessor Seán Aylward had.

Some 15 years ago, when he worked as a higher executive officer in the Department of Social Welfare, he signed the paperwork stopping weekly dole payments of £92 to the Dublin underworld boss Martin Cahill, who was known as the General.

Hooded men
As a result, Mr Purcell was abducted from his Dublin home in the early hours by four hooded men, who had tied up his pregnant wife as the couple's two sons slept.

They took Mr Purcell away in his family car and drove him to Cahill. The infamous criminal shot the Civil Servant twice in the legs.

He later sent Mr Purcell a get-well card as he was recovering in hospital that read: “The General prognosis is good.”

Mr Purcell would make a full recovery and went on to resume his career in the civil service, spending some of that time in the prisons division of the Department of Justice before becoming prison service director general in 2004.

His tenure as director general coincided with the darkest days of the prison system, with the gang culture, the levels of violence up to and including murder, drug smuggling, phone smuggling and overcrowding all peaking under his watch.

Progressive successor
However, when the current head of the prison service Michael Donnellan succeeded Purcell he immediately introduced ambitious plans seen as much more progressive and human-rights based, with regimes engineered to encourage and reward good behaviour.

Early release schemes pushed for during Mr Purcell’s term in office, but never introduced, were immediately rolled out at Mr Donnellan’s instigation and with the backing of Mr Shatter.

Mr Purcell was head of the service in July 2010 when the decision was made to install a new system to record prisoners’ phone calls out of the jail, the same system now revealed to have inadvertently recorded calls between inmates and their lawyers.

Mr Purcell is also at the centre of the political controversy surrounding the 16-day gap last month between his office receiving a warning letter from former Garda commissioner Martin Callinan about the system of Garda recording calls in stations and Mr Shatter receiving the letter.

The delay occurred despite Mr Callinan specifically requesting the letter be brought to Mr Shatter’s attention. It was Mr Purcell who was sent by Taoiseach Enda Kenny to the home of Mr Callinan the weekend before last to explain to him the difficulties being caused in Government over his use of the term “disgusting” to describe the Garda whistleblowers and of the emerging scandal around the Garda tapes.

Those close to Mr Callinan said while Mr Purcell “was only the messenger”, his house call to Mr Callinan engineered the position from which the Garda commissioner left his post two days later.