The protest by some of Dublin's prison officers this week highlighted the difficulties of dealing with the State's most violent prisoners, writes CONOR LALLY, Crime Correspondent
ONLY A HANDFUL OF inmates in the Republic’s near 4,300-strong prison population could cause the disruption that Leroy Dumbrell did this week. The 25-year-old Dubliner’s transfer from Castlerea Prison, in Co Roscommon, to Mountjoy, in Dublin, caused prison officers to walk off the job for four hours, leaving almost 700 prisoners locked in their cells with only a skeleton staff to guard them.
The officers eventually returned, but they said they would strike if additional security measures were not put in place around Dumbrell.
The new governor of Mountjoy, Ned Whelan, accused the officers of risking the safety of the prison and their colleagues by what he called their “wildcat” walkout on Tuesday afternoon.
What were supposed to be clear-the-air talks yesterday morning between the Prison Officers’ Association, Whelan and the Irish Prison Service were cancelled. The prison service said it was postponing the meeting because of the strike threat.
Prison officers say Dumbrell is a dangerous inmate with a particularly worrying history of participating in serious prison violence. They also say plans to hold him in the new separation unit in Mountjoy are misguided.
Sources say Dumbrell effectively ran the gang controlling the B Division in Mountjoy before he was transferred out last December. One prison officer said: “He is tall, fit and violent, and he has a lot of friends in Mountjoy. He seems to have influence over them. That gives him a power base.”
Dumbrell has been known to gardaí since he was a child, and despite spending a large portion of his adult life in jail he has proved an industrious criminal, clocking up almost 60 convictions.
On New Year’s Eve in 2002 Dumbrell, then aged 16, and two others carried out an attackon a disabled and learning-impaired couple that was described in court as “bordering on cruelly sadistic”. They went to a house in Maryland, in Dublin’s south inner city, and ordered one of the residents, a man in his 30s with learning difficulties, to get them drink.
When he came back, what was described in court as “an incident of some depravity” unfolded. The man was hit with a tumbler and shovel by Dumbrell, and later a crutch. Dumbrell then heated a saucepan of boiling water and poured it over the badly injured man.
A woman in the house in her 20s, with multiple sclerosis, was held down and bitten, hit and stabbed by the trio before lighter fuel was poured over her and she was set on fire. The flames were extinguished by Dumbrell and his two attackers using another pot of boiling water.
Dumbrell was eventually jailed for five years in October 2005. But during the nearly three years he was on bail awaiting trial he constantly came to the attention of the Garda Síochána.
In the south inner city in July 2004 Dumbrell, then aged 19, attacked a man out walking his dog, assaulting him so badly that he lost the sight in his eye. The attack began when Dumbrell challenged the man about why he had sighed loudly when Dumbrell passed him on the street. He was jailed for eight years in 2006 for that attack.
Last December he was involved in a riot at Mountjoy, during which a group of up to 40 prisoners attacked a group numbering about 10 in the B Division. It took staff more than an hour to restore order, by which time one prisoner had been stabbed five times. A total of 12 prisoners and officers were badly injured.
In February Dumbrell was transferred to Castlerea. He was held there in solitary confinement for almost six months in order to maintain order at the jail. Earlier this month, however, he won a High Court case challenging the regime under which he was being held.
The Irish Prison Service decided to transfer him back to Mountjoy to a newly opened area of the prison known as the separation unit. His transfer prompted an immediate walkout by prison officers at the Dublin jail.
The officers argue that the separation unit was only ever meant to house inmates in need of protection from other prisoners. They say insufficient numbers of staff work there to cater for ringleaders such as Dumbrell, who is from Emmet Road in Inchicore, Dublin. “Most of the prisoners in the separation unit are there so they won’t be attacked by people precisely like Dumbrell,” said one prison officer.
The issue of inmates in need of protection being housed in cells with dangerous prisoners was highlighted four years ago when 21-year-old Gary Douche was beaten to death in Mountjoy by another prisoner, 26-year-old Stephen Egan of Coolock, Dublin.
Egan, who was not on protection, had been placed in a communal cell with a group of protection inmates because there was nowhere else to put him in the crowded jail.
This week Mountjoy’s governor said that Dumbrell was being housed in the separation unit because he needed protection from other inmates and not because he had proven so disruptive in the past. “This fella is not a disruptive prisoner; this fella is a protection prisoner,” he said.
Ned Whelan was not available to The Irish Times for comment on this article, but a spokesman for the Irish Prison Service insisted that Dumbrell was under threat of attack from other inmates in the jail. The decision to place him in the separation unit had been made on that basis. In response to the POA’s concerns about staffing on the unit, the spokesman said staffing levels were sufficient.
Some prison officers point out, however, that when the Irish Prison Service decided in the 1990s to house disruptive inmates in Mountjoy’s separation unit it led to the prison’s worst riot and the closure of the unit for a decade, until its recent reopening.
The president of the Prison Officers’ Association, Stephen Delaney, says his members have become increasingly concerned in recent weeks about the regime in the separation unit being relaxed. It appears to officers that dangerous criminals, rather than those in need of protection, are being housed there, because space at the jail is at a premium.
“An officer getting slashed in the face with a razor last week in the separation unit obviously increased those fears,” says Delaney. “And then Dumbrell arriving on Tuesday . . .”
A senior prison officer in Mountjoy says two units are needed: one for weaker inmates needing protection and one for the segregation of troublesome prisoners away from the wider prison population.
“When the Midlands Prison was built they had a unit for really disruptive inmates, but it was never opened,” he adds. “The Government then closed the Curragh place of detention, and all the sex offenders there were moved to the unopened Midlands unit. So now there’s really nowhere in the prison system for people like Leroy Dumbrell.”
