AUTOBIOGRAPHY: IVANA BACIKreviews The Governor: The Life and Times of the Man Who Ran MountjoyBy John Lonergan Penguin Ireland, 266pp. £14.99
JOHN LONERGAN was governor of Mountjoy for 26 years, and worked a total of 42 years in the prison service. During that time he became well known for his compassionate views on prison reform. This honest, forthright and highly readable account of his career is written in his distinctive voice. It can often be a grim tale, but it is lightened by Lonergan’s innate faith in humanity. He displays real empathy for the prisoners under his care, commenting that “some children are born into circumstances where the odds are so stacked against them it is almost impossible for them to overcome the obstacles in their path”.
Lonergan himself had a rural 1950s childhood, growing up in a family of eight in Bansha, Co Tipperary. Despite some idyllic memories, he comments that “poverty wasn’t far around the corner”. They lived in a thatched cottage with no running water, his father was a handyman and his mother worked in the house, cooking over an open fire. Although he loved secondary school, Lonergan writes that there was no question of his going on to third-level education; it was “just out of our league”. After working in a local sawmill for some years he became a bus conductor in Dublin, then saw a newspaper advert recruiting prison officers. He applied for the interview on a whim, but to his surprise was appointed as an officer in Limerick Prison in 1968.
From that day he rose rapidly through the ranks, working in a wide range of prisons, and was appointed governor of Mountjoy at the youthful age of 36. He remembers his appointment, in 1984, for its unreality: having signed his contract, he was sent to take over as governor “with no instructions, no briefing, no outline of what the Department’s policy was in relation to Mountjoy”. This lack of planning or coherent policymaking within the Department of Justice is a theme throughout the book. Our prison service has consistently been run without any clear vision or leadership.
In particular, there has never been any sustained commitment to improving prison conditions nationally. This means that, in the chronically overcrowded, Dickensian facilities of Mountjoy, hundreds of prisoners continue to slop out every day. They must use a bucket for a toilet, because there is no in-cell sanitation, and they are locked in their cells for 17 hours a day, including mealtimes. Lonergan graphically describes the humiliation of having to perform basic bodily functions in front of cellmates in a tiny space. Anyone who has ever visited Mountjoy will be aware of the smell of human excreta that permeates the prison. That this practice has been allowed to continue so long is a national disgrace.
Lonergan’s time as governor may have been dominated by frustration at the lack of commitment to improving conditions, but he also experienced many dramatic events and saw many changes. He provides a gripping account of the siege in 1999, when a number of prisoners held officers hostage for several days. He writes about the rising incidence of drug addiction and the increase in casual violence among prisoners, and speaks movingly about the tragic deaths within the prison. He notes that overcrowding clearly aggravates the situation but again says that he was never able to get any sustained commitment to relieve pressure of numbers.
He had assumed that prison conditions might improve with the transfer of overall control of the prison service from the Department of Justice to the semi-independent Irish Prison Service, in 1999, but he acknowledges that he was wrong in that assumption. If anything, things have got worse.
Of course, many progressive initiatives were taken during his time as governor. He speaks glowingly of the prison drama project, and commends the achievements of the Connect rehabilitation programme, run by prison officers in the 1990s in conjunction with the National Training and Development Institute. Over several visits to Mountjoy during that period I saw the Connect programme in action and was immensely impressed by the rehabilitation opportunities it offered prisoners.
Very sadly, this programme, like the drama project, has since been ended – essentially scuppered largely due to lack of commitment from the Irish Prison Service. Even the building of the Dóchas Centre (the women’s prison) in the 1990s – a genuinely progressive development, initiated by Máire Geoghegan-Quinn as minister for justice – was given only lukewarm prison-service support.
Yet Lonergan persevered with attempts at reform. Between 1999 and 2001 he sought to extend the rehabilitative principles of Dóchas into the men’s prison. He chaired a Mountjoy redevelopment group that prepared detailed plans for redesigning the existing building. Then, in 2002, six weeks before the general election, O’Donoghue announced a decision to rebuild the prison gate. This made no sense in the context of the bigger plan, and Lonergan describes it as a “cock-up and a shambles”. After the election the new minister, Michael McDowell, devised a completely different plan, purchasing a farm called Thornton Hall to provide a site for an entirely new prison. An extraordinary amount of money – more than €41 million – has been spent on the site, but in this recession there is little prospect of the building being completed. Thornton Hall has become a costly white elephant.
Meanwhile, appalling physical conditions prevail at Mountjoy, and there remains no sign of a coherent prison policy emerging from the current Minister for Justice. In assessing the ministers he has served, Lonergan comments that during the two years between Dermot Ahern’s appointment and Lonergan’s own retirement, Ahern neither visited Mountjoy nor ever met or spoke with Lonergan. That, says Lonergan succinctly, “summarises Dermot Ahern’s interest in and commitment to prisons”.
Unfortunately, there is little interest in or commitment to prisons among policymakers generally. In writing this thoughtful and compassionate book, John Lonergan is shining a welcome light on a shamefully neglected area. Ministers and policy makers alike have much to learn from his vast experience as prison governor, and from the sensible, humane and rational prison reforms that he so powerfully advocates.
Ivana Bacik is a Labour Senator for Dublin University, a barrister and Reid professor of criminal law at Trinity College Dublin
