Murders, escapes and disorder in Irish prisons - the new Minister for Justice faces an uphill battle, writes Conor Lally, Crime Correspondent.
The past year has been such a bad one for the Irish Prison Service, it's hard to know where to begin to analyse it. Do you start with the stabbing to death of Derek Glennon in Mountjoy last Monday or the beating and strangling to death of Gary Douch in the same prison last August?
Maybe the absconding from an eight-year prison term of a temporarily released Bolivian major cocaine dealer would be more apt? Would it be better to start a bit closer to home with Mark Kenny, released from a six-year sentence by mistake last week? Or what about the escape of Jonathan Dunne late last year after he was transferred to an open prison despite being a drug dealer with a history of absconding?
Then again, maybe the two budgies and the plasma TVs, the smuggled-in mobile phones and chargers, the drugs, and the syringes found in Portlaoise maximum security prison in May best capture the lunacy of it all.
But we shouldn't forget the phone call last month from the same prison made by armed robber John Daly to Joe Duffy's Liveline radio programme on a smuggled-in mobile phone.
The events have a certain black humour about them, but it's no laughing matter for the families of those affected. These include the petrol station workers in whose faces Daly stuck a sawn-off shotgun during two robberies in 1999, for which he was jailed. And Veronica Guerin's family, who would have heard that pets and plasma TVs were being laid on in the Portlaoise wing where John Gilligan is housed.
As Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan continued to adjust to his new surroundings on Monday afternoon, the stabbing to death of Derek Glennon will have acted as a reminder of the challenges faced by the prison service.
Lenihan's predecessor, Michael McDowell, ended a regime in which more than €60 million was being paid annually in overtime to prison officers. He left office with the badly-needed replacement for Mountjoy prison, in north Co Dublin, in the early stages of construction.
But at a time when the prison population was growing to unmanageable proportions, McDowell closed two prisons - Spike Island and the Curragh - so that staff could be transferred elsewhere to negate the need for overtime across the system.
In many of the prisons that remained open, much of the rehabilitative elements, such as workshops and libraries, were closed to save even more money.
Plans for a drug-free regime have not materialised. Technology that would block the signal needed to operate a smuggled phone has long been promised but, aside from one pilot project, has yet to come on stream.
This is despite repeated warnings from gardaí that phones are being used to organise the smuggling of drugs into prisons and also by gang bosses to co-ordinate serious organised crime on the outside, up to and including murder.
All the while, homeless, mentally-ill and drug-addicted inmates continue to flow into an already dysfunctional prison system.
While recent events clearly demonstrate that Irish prisons are the scene of often savage violence (see panel), where drugs, weapons, mobile phones, and alcohol are all readily available, it is the murder of Gary Douch last August that best illustrates where it is all going wrong.
A litany of preventable errors, within a system run on a shoestring, conspired to effectively facilitate his death.
On Monday, July 31st, 2006, the 21-year-old Douch approached prison staff at Mountjoy informing them he feared for his safety. The Dubliner, who was serving three years for assault causing harm, possession of drugs and road traffic offences, did not reveal the identity of those he feared. A decision was taken to place in him in a protection cell in the basement.
These basement cells were never meant to house inmates overnight - they were built as holding cells, places where men who had just been convicted in the courts would be locked up for a number of hours before being formally committed to the prison system and allocated a bed in Mountjoy or transferred to another prison.
However, last summer the prison system had reached an overcrowding pinch point. Mountjoy was housing 530 inmates at the time of Douch's killing, even though there was only room for a maximum of 470.
There were no single occupancy protection cells in which to house Douch, so for his own protection he was sent - by staff who had no other option - to the basement to sleep in one of the communal holding cells. Most of the other inmates in the holding cells were also there for protection purposes; however, Douch was attacked, beaten and strangled to death in the night.
After the attack, excrement was smeared on his body.
Because of overcrowding, a mix of prisoners had ended up sharing a cell, including some of the most vulnerable inmates in the prison.
A range of facilities that should have been available, but were not, might well have saved Gary Douch. These include: a single occupancy protection cell in which to house him; a prison system free from overcrowding; and an easily-accessible overflow facility that could be deployed when overcrowding began to occur.
Within a fortnight of Douch's death, other events took place at Mountjoy that confirmed Douch's killing was a symptom of a seriously ailing system rather than a one-off event. A Nigerian inmate was stabbed repeatedly in the jail. A man died from a drugs overdose. Another hanged himself.
Irish prison service director general Brian Purcell was accused of defeatism this week when he said it was not always possible to prevent killings such as that of Derek Glennon, the 24-year-old Dubliner stabbed in the chest in a fight in Mountjoy on Monday while serving a manslaughter sentence.
"Short of locking prisoners up 24 hours a day, it's very difficult to prevent with complete certainty violent incidents occurring from time to time in prison," Purcell said.
However, many factors that he and his staff should have control over - such as the flow of drugs, phones, and weapons into jails - seem to be slipping further from the prison service's grasp.
Brian Lenihan was anxious to move quickly after Derek Glennon's killing, and on Tuesday he unveiled a plan to wrest back control of the prison system. It included proposals to recruit an extra 178 staff, some of whom would form dedicated search teams to find drugs and other contraband. Some of the proposals - including segregation units for gang leaders, and sniffer dogs to find drugs - have been unveiled before. Nonetheless, if the dedicated search team system is in place quickly and works well, it has the potential to help restore order.
In a prison system where inmates have been allowed to have pets and plasma TVs in their cells - in what is supposed to be the country's most secure jail, Portlaoise, which houses some of our most dangerous criminals - the restoration of order is likely to prove a long-term project. Inside story: a prison year
• Monday, June 25th, 2007: Derek Glennon (24) is stabbed to death by another inmate in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison.
• Wednesday, June 20th, 2007: Mark Kenny (35) is mistakenly released early from prison while serving a six-year sentence for robbery.
• May 2007: Bolivian national Juan Carlos Melgar Alba (42), serving eight years for drugs offences, absconds after being granted temporary release from Mountjoy Prison. A Garda search party finds mobile phones, chargers, plasma TVs, ecstasy, cocaine and two budgies at Portlaoise Prison. Armed robber John Daly rings Joe Duffy's Liveline radio chat show on a smuggled mobile phone from his cell in the maximum-security Portlaoise Prison.
• March 2007: Three prison officers are arrested on suspicion of selling phones, alcohol, steroids and illicit drugs to prisoners.
• August 2006: Gary Douch (21) is beaten to death in a basement cell of Mountjoy Prison.