ELLA O Dwyer, a republican prisoner in Maghaberry Prison, near Belfast, has appealed for bureaucratic hold ups on her application for, compassionate leave, to be waived so that she can visit her critically ill father in Co Tipperary.
O Dwyer, in the 12th year of a discretionary life sentence, has not seen her father for two years and claims he will never see her again unless she is given compassionate leave.
The Tipperary woman was transferred to Maghberry from a prison in England in 1994. Her imprisonment in the North is regarded as temporary and all prison decisions are still made by the British Home Office in London.
In a letter to The Irish Times, O'Dwyer asserted that had she been arrested in the North, her request for compassionate parole would have been dealt with "within hours".
Her father has been forbidden by doctors to make the journey to visit her and was recently admitted to hospital with a serious heart condition.
"On Friday of last week, was told that was critically for compassionate parole," she wrote. "What I have been met with is an endless round of distressing, disturbing and deliberately effected obstacles designed to stall and prevent such a visit."
The Home Office had written to her to say that she must produce documentation of her father's condition from the hospital and have it forwarded via the Northern Ireland Office.
When this was done, with great difficulty, she said, the Home Office wrote to acknowledge receipt of the documents and to ask if she still wanted to proceed with the application. If she did, she would have to provide yet another written report from the hospital.
"By now my father's condition was still very critical and I was distraught with worry," she wrote. She had asked the Department of Foreign Affairs, which had helped in getting the original documentation, to again confirm her request and to state that the reports they already had, still reflected her father's condition.
She continued. The Home Office were yet again given the phone number of the doctor in charge so that they could confirm, matters directly. I then approached a prison governor to inquire about the progress of my application, only to be told that once more had to write to confirm that I wished to proceed with the initial request.
"I did this in great haste only to be told that it would not be faxed off until Monday and to be even asked hours later about the reason for my application.
"A week has passed and my father has been told that he is unfit for a by pass, operation and is being treated with very strong medication, with a view to surgery in the very near future. As I write this, I still do not have an answer to my request and I can't help but believe that they are deliberately stalling in the view that my father will simply die and the whole matter become a non issue."