The convicted kidnapper, Mr Eddie Gallagher, said yesterday he agreed that former prisoners should serve on prison visiting committees although he did not want to himself.
Mr Gallagher was responding to a report in The Irish Times that in 2000 Minister of State, Mr Pat "The Cope" Gallagher, then an MEP, lobbied to have Mr Gallagher appointed to a prison visiting committee but the request was not met.
Mr Gallagher and Ms Marian Coyle kidnapped Dutch industrialist Mr Tiede Herrema in 1975. Mr Gallagher was sentenced to 20 years in jail and served 14. Ms Coyle received 15 years and served 10.
"I am not lobbying personally for myself to become a member of a visiting committee but for people who have been in prison and have some experience of being on the other side of the prison walls to be involved in such visiting committees," Mr Gallagher said on RTE's Liveline with guest presenter Derek Davis.
He thought that Mr Pat "The Cope" Gallagher had adopted a quite honourable position in nominating him. "He is just a decent man trying to fix a system that he knows isn't quite right."
He said there should be balance on the committees. They should not be loaded by political parties with their own people, a practice he had seen when he was in prison, he said. It was not going to overthrow the system by letting one or two ex-prisoners sit on visitors' committees.
Asked if he thought the prison system and conditions had changed for the better in the last 28 years, Mr Gallagher replied that it was the same prison regime which was still controlled by the prison officers rather than the governors.
"I don't think many recommendations have been acted on," he said. Reports were brought out every year and put on the shelf to gather dust.
"The Minister for Justice doesn't seem to be keeping account of the way prisons are run," Mr Gallagher commented.
He said when he was in prison he witnessed abuse. "There was a lot of abuse and we got many's a beating inside prison. It was the policy of the coalition government at that time to strip search people one, two, three times a day. If you didn't agree to that you got beat up so we got beat up pretty often," Mr Gallagher said.
He said they raised it with the prison visitors' committee but no-one took much interest.
"A lot of the prisons that I got a look at, I would say that 50 percent of the people in any right thinking society would have been in mental hospitals getting psychological help," he said.
He said he was just getting on with his life now. Long-term prisoners who were released could get help when they came out but prison visitors could do a lot when such prisoners began their sentences.
If he, as an ex-prisoner, wanted to go to the US, he would be put in a concrete box, shackled and kept there incommunicado until he agreed to return to Ireland.
"While at the same time maybe somebody who was involved with me using guns and whatever 30 years ago, may at that time be walking through an executive suite in the airport being welcomed by the State Department," he said.
Asked if he was referring to the Sinn Féin leadership, Mr Gallagher said: "Well, not Sinn Féin leadership, but republican leadership."