'In a Dáil reply you said you hoped I would be satisfied. Alas, I must report that I am extremely dissatisfied and to phrase it another way I am less than gruntled!". Mary Rafterywrites.
Thus wrote the Inspector of Prisons, former High Court Justice Dermot Kinlen, to the minister for justice in 2005, a letter which he included in his annual report. It is but one example of the enormously refreshing style of Judge Kinlen, who sadly died yesterday.
He had an often bellicose relationship with both the minister and the officials of the Department of Justice and the Prisons Service. His annual reports were a regular kick in the solar plexus for those individuals. Dermot Kinlen, to his eternal credit, was given to neither restraint nor understatement.
The dissatisfaction referred to above concerned what he described as a conspicuous lack of co-operation from the minister's department, including lengthy delays in publishing his annual reports. Kinlen was the first Inspector of Prisons appointed since 1835 and, in his own words, the expectation was that "I would not do any real work". He set about confounding any notion that his purpose was merely decorative window dressing.
He became very cross when attempts were made by the then minister Michael McDowell to censor his reports on the basis that they contained libellous statements. In one extraordinary exchange, he threatened to sue McDowell, claiming that any reference to libel was in fact defamatory of him and his office of Inspector of Prisons. The minister wisely backed down, and the judge's reports were in future published without intervention.
Kinlen was an unrelenting scourge of what he perceived as the official mindset that rules our prisons system. His view that "the obsession of some few in the Department [ of Justice] to adhere to the principle of POWER, CONTROL AND SECRECY is long established". The capital letters are his own, and illustrate a depth of feeling informed by decades of experience. He had long been committed to prison reform, and early in his career as a barrister had joined the Prisoners Aftercare Community Effort (PACE), a charity assisting former prisoners with accommodation and employment.
As a result, he was appointed to the Visiting Committee of St Patrick's (the prison for young offenders). He tells us of this in his third annual report as Inspector of Prisons, mentioning that he was "shocked to find that in previous years the Visiting Committee concentrated on two points in their reports. Firstly they congratulated the Governor on the garden (such as it is!) and the Chaplain on the great attendance at the annual retreat".
He and a few others immediately set about drawing up proposals to reform the relevant rules in order to increase the powers of prison visiting committees. However, the Department of Justice ignored their letters, and a year later failed to reappoint any of them to the St Patrick's committee. The Catholic chaplain, who had also sought reform, was fired and barred from the premises, forbidden even to remove his own belongings.
This was all so unusual that Kinlen complained to the minister for justice, who apparently knew nothing about it. The decisions had been taken solely by officials within the department. Kinlen tells us that he alone was reinstated, but adds with a certain relish that the chaplain who was so badly treated subsequently went on to become a bishop.
It was personal stories such as these which made Judge Kinlen's reports such a pleasure to read. Not for him the dry, dull, detached approach that renders so many official reports virtually impenetrable. But underlying his lively tone was a steely determination to expose the inhumanity of the system. St Patrick's was described as "a continuing disaster". Cork prison was also a "disaster", with the premises in an "appalling condition".
He was savage in his repeated condemnation of prisoners forced to go to the toilet in buckets in their cells. "Disgusting" was how he described the practice of making prisoners also eat their meals in those same cells. He continually identified fundamental failings in the mental healthcare of prisoners, saying that "they are being degraded and denied their human rights by a society and a Government who just want them hidden - out of sight and out of mind (in every sense)".
Strongly favouring probation as an alternative to prison for certain lesser offences, the judge was not averse to criticising his former colleagues on the bench for their over-use of prison sentences and apparent lack of interest in seeking alternatives. For colourful and razor-sharp insights into the bureaucratic underbelly of the beast that is our prison system, it would be hard to beat Dermot Kinlen's reports. He had that rare quality, an ability to present the unvarnished truth with devastating directness.
Despite the often grim nature of that truth, he remained undaunted. As he wrote in 2005, "in my job one has to be addicted to 'hope' no matter how depressing 'the reality' may be".
His will be a hard act to follow.