When Liam Lawlor began serving his second prison sentence in Mountjoy prison's B basement, he replaced Laurence Murphy in cell 18. On Thursday, a jury convicted Murphy of the murder of 22-year-old Thomas Brady, one of Lawlor's constituents. Rita O'Reilly reports on a case of special treatment and parallel lives.
The hours and days of Easter week 2000 brought hard times for Liam Lawlor. As the political lobbyist Frank Dunlop stepped out of line to tell tales of the brown envelope at the Flood tribunal, the Dublin West Fianna Fáil TD ducked to avoid press claims that he was Mr Powerful, the significant individual recipient of £40,000 in just one transaction referred to in Dunlop's evidence.
Hard times too for the two occupants of cell 18, A3 landing, Mountjoy, one of them a constituent of Lawlor.
Thomas "Tomo" Brady (22), of Rowlagh Crescent, Neilstown, was in a cell with habitual offender and heroin mainliner, Laurence "Larry" Murphy.
Victims of overcrowding, the two were doubling up in a cell designed for one, sharing the space with two beds, two chairs, four lockers, some shelves, paint tins, a bucket, cloth and cleaning creams.
Tomo was in just three weeks and was getting through a 10-day detox on the heroin replacement, physeptone, by smoking a bit of H on the side. His girlfriend was doubling up too: she was paying prison visits to both Tomo and Larry to ensure twice the supply of drugs to the one cell.
In Neilstown, Thomas Brady's family harboured doses of sympathy for him, but they believed they had run out of ways to get help.
As he left his home for a Circuit Court appearance on March 31st, his mother Jean told his father: "Don't bail him out." Tomo had first taken to robbing from the house and then taken to smashing it up. The family say they were at their wits' end trying to get him off drugs.
Now in court for his first offence outside the home, his father asked Judge Elizabeth Dunne to teach Tomo a lesson. She imposed a three-year sentence for the youth's part in the robbery of a video shop in Palmerstown, but entered a review date of six months. The remainder of the sentence would hang over him as a threat. He would serve it unless his behaviour changed.
A heroin user since he was 13, Tomo's cellmate Larry Murphy had served time in eight penal institutions in England, Scotland and Ireland.
"I haven't been out for more than 11 months since I was 16," he told his trial.
His father was jailed for eight years for robbery when Larry jnr was three years old. He later claimed he only saw him twice a free man, and then only because Larry snr had escaped from jail.
Mountjoy records dating from 1996 show a history of drug use and threatening behaviour. In June 1996, when he was disciplined for taking another prisoner hostage, a medical officer's report stated that he was "a danger to himself, other prisoners and to members of staff.
On February 4th, 2000, he was reprimanded for fighting with an inmate. On March 31st, prison officers found him, in his own words, "kicking the head off some other worker on B landing".
They confiscated a knife.
Murphy was later to say he had three or four similar knives in the same period. He would carry a knife down his waistband when he left his cell. "It was for protection, I was just paranoid", he told gardaí.
More than two dozen referrals for psychiatric assessment between 1996 and 2000 and three admissions to the Central Mental Hospital, Dundrum, found he was not insane.
However, a February 1997 report by Dr Charles Smith, consultant psychiatrist at the hospital, found some of Murphy's mental experience marked "genuine illness phenomena" and accepted that he was "at times, briefly out of touch with reality".
The March 31st incident was his 10th disciplinary offence in Mountjoy. The authorities removed his recreational privileges for 28 days.
On Good Friday, April 21st, as Liam Lawlor faced increasing pressure to resign from the Oireachtas Committee on Members' Interests, Larry Murphy celebrated his 23rd birthday in his cell in Mountjoy, six months into a 12-month sentence for assaulting a garda. Sentencing for two robberies - one committed while he was out on bail for the other - had been put back for the preparation of a psychiatric report.
Murphy was anxious to plead guilty and get it over with. He wanted out. In the weeks after the adjournment, he sought a transfer. "I told them I had to get out of Mountjoy because I was strung out on heroin," he said.
The prison authorities told him he wouldn't get one while he was facing charges. "They just wouldn't listen to me," he later complained.
Murphy had prepared another knife that he kept wedged under a chair in his cell. He had taken a butter knife and filed it down with sandpaper, sharpening it against the rough window ledge outside the cell. He then tied shoelaces around the handle and bound it with adhesive tape to tighten the grip.
Mid-afternoon on Saturday, April 22nd, he and Thomas Brady took sleeping tablets and smoked some heroin. When Tomo came back after recreation, they sat talking in the cell "about his bird, my bird, and kids and that".
At the trial, Murphy agreed that he thought things were going quite well for Tomo in his life; better than for him - he had lost contact with all his family.
"But I didn't begrudge him it," he told the prosecution lawyer, Paul McDermott.
By late night, the buzz from the drugs had worn off. Tomo was in bed asleep but Murphy was still restless. He sat on his bed brooding about life.
He started to get uneasy, "about not seeing my son, my family - jail itself is a burden on your shoulders, never mind anything else", he said. He agreed he was angry and bitter.
"I was bitter about the system taking my father away from me when I was only a kid," he said.
As the jury listened to his own version of diminished responsibility, he agreed that he took the knife from under the chair and sat back on his bed.
"All the time thinking how awful the system was?" he was asked. "Yeah, well I think like that every day anyway," he replied.
In one moment at around 2.25 a.m. in the early hours of Easter Sunday, April 23rd, he went over and stabbed his cellmate in the chest. His crude attempts to sharpen the butter knife had failed to put a tip on the blade.
"It took a very considerable thrust to drive such a round-ended knife into the chest", the State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison said.
Thomas Brady died from injuries to the heart; the knife left stuck three inches into his chest.
In the weeks that followed, Liam Lawlor took time out of his troubles to send his constituents a Mass card and letter of condolence.
Laurence Murphy was moved to a padded cell in the medical unit and then to Wheatfield, from where he returned to Mountjoy last year to a cell beside his uncle, by then also in to serve time for robbery.
On January 2nd, Murphy was transferred back to Wheatfield, and Liam Lawlor took his cell in Mountjoy's B basement.
Official sources say Murphy was transferred because they needed the cell. Lawlor was another prisoner requiring special treatment.
Officials point out that Murphy was only transferred back to Mountjoy on a temporary basis in advance of his trial to break his isolation in Wheatfield and to give him a chance to talk to his uncle. But when they sought his transfer back again after Lawlor's release, Murphy was having none of it.
He remained in Wheatfield.
During his trial he admitted that the last thought that came into his head before he went over and stuck the knife in Thomas Brady's chest was "F . . . the world." By way of explanation, he added: "I was born into this world, I didn't make it."
While Murphy was left to blame the system for what he did, Thomas Brady's parents are turning blame on themselves.
"We blame ourselves for putting him in prison," his mother Jean said yesterday.