THE man was known to be violent, and ready to commit another violent act. His sentence for the last offence was almost up and he was due for release. Everyone knew he would do it again says Dr Art O'Connor. But nothing could be done. The man got out and went to Britain where he raped and then murdered a young woman.
"It's very sad for society that we can't take some kind of action to protect people," Dr O'Connor says. "It's terrible that we have to wait until something happens.
Having dealt with some of the most dangerous people in the State, Dr O'Connor, a 40 year old psychiatrist who works at the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum, has come to believe that society and its legal system has now "got the balance wrong. All the rights are in favour of the offender and not the ordinary man in the street."
He sees a similarity with the way the Catholic Church first sought to cope with revelations of child abuse by priests. "The Church's first consideration was the priest, its second was the Church. The third was, possibly, money. And the victim came last." Now, he says, the Church has finally seen the importance of putting the victim first, and that should be welcomed. But the rest of society needs to change too.
As a forensic psychiatrist Dr O'Connor works at the junction of psychiatry and crime, assessing the minds of criminals, mainly to help the judges and juries to understand the offenders who come before them. He has just published his first book Criminals Inside the Mind of Criminals and Victims. In it he seeks to explain to a wider audience what makes criminals commit their crimes, and how their victims are affected.
The publication is timely, following the conclusion of the Brendan O'Donnell case, in which the triple murderer failed to convince a jury that he was insane. The case was made all the more intriguing by the fact that psychiatrists were produced by both prosecution and defence.
"Psychiatrists are as near as we can get experts in mental illness. But psychiatry is not an exact science, it never was, Dr O'Connor says. "Things are not black and white. Yet a court requires you to come down on one side or the other, and it's right that it should, because the jury has to make a decision."
HE says that when he appears in court, barristers sometimes insist on a "yes or no" answer to what he considers to be a complex question. "I always reply "I have taken an oath to tell the whole Irish as opposed to answering the question in that way. That's a good way of getting around the question, and the judges appreciate that."
The O'Donnell verdict was "a good result" according to Dr O'Connor. In particular, it benefits the families of the victims, who would suffer further if O'Donnell achieved the technical acquittal of a "guilty but insane" verdict. Also, the public would probably have been very sceptical of such a verdict.
O'Connor's book is aimed at helping the public understand the psychological background to many types of crime, but particularly violent crime against another person. Written in a chatty, informal style, it features actual and "composite" cases which Dr O'Connor has handled, but with names changed to disguise identities. Dr O'Connor hopes that when his readers see newspaper reports of cases such as O'Donnell's, or when they encounter crime such as rape or child abuse in their own lives, they will have greater insight into why the crime came to be committed.
Dr O'Connor has encountered hundreds of offenders in Britain and in this country since he qualified in medicine at UCD in 1979, and began to specialise in forensic psychiatry. Over years of listening to offenders' explanations of what they have done, one thought has impressed itself upon him above all others.
"People are responsible for their actions. It's far too simplistic to say society is to blame, or unemployment, or lack of education," he says. "Take the example of a couple of young fellas in a van who drive up to an old man's house and think about robbing him. They decide to do it. Then they might drive around a bit just to check there's no one else about. That's another decision. They go up to the front door, they decide to go in. Maybe they decide to beat up the old man, or even murder him.
"There's a whole series of decisions there which you can't explain away by saying oh, they didn't have any employment opportunities. That's an insult to all the unemployed people who have no involvement in crime."
Dr O'Connor and his colleagues deal with about 80 inmates in the secure hospital at Dundrum, half of whom are "in the long term category". The rest have been transferred from prisons after becoming mentally disturbed. He also sees sexual offenders there on an outpatient basis. Of the 650 people seen since 1989, about a third have been incest offenders, a third paedophiles, the rest made up of exhibitionists and young offenders.
It seems incongruous to be filling the living room of Dr O'Connor's quiet, suburban, family home in south Dublin with their stories of incest, violence, rape and murder. But Dr O'Connor says he rarely takes his work home, even in his head. He considers the job far less traumatic than that of an ambulance driver, or a nurse in a casualty ward, or a Garda who encounters violence as he tries to break up a fight.
"I do my work, I enjoy it, and I come home," he says. "I don't allow it to haunt me"