A PRISON officer at Mountjoy Prison has told the Circuit Civil Court he had a relationship with the wife of a prisoner who was in the Dublin jail at the time.
Paul Moles (41), Grangerath, Colpe Road, Co Meath, yesterday failed in a €50,000 defamation claim against the Irish Star newspaper which, in April 2010, exposed his affair.
He now faces a legal bill of more than €20,000.
Judge Jacqueline Linnane said the Star’s lead story, that an unidentified married prison officer at Ireland’s toughest jail had been suspended over allegations he had slept with an inmate’s wife, was true.
The judge said the newspaper’s claims that the alleged affair was exposed following an investigation at Mountjoy Prison and that the officer could face serious disciplinary procedures were also true.
Judge Linnane told the newspaper’s barrister Shane English that Mr Moles had admitted in cross-examination that the article, under the headline “Jailer’s sex with con’s wife”, was, in the main, true.
The judge did not accept that a reference in the article to complaints against the warder by other women, claiming that he had asked for their phone numbers, was capable of inferring the defamatory meaning Mr Moles alleged.
Judge Linnane said Mr Moles had not been identified in the article and three of his friends and colleagues – a former soldier and best man at his wedding, Peter Murphy; prison officer John Brennan and prison officer Pat Brompton – had been able to identify him only because they had previous knowledge of his suspension from his job pending an investigation.
Séamus Ó Tuathail SC, for Mr Moles, claimed the article contained defamatory remarks and innuendoes regarding him and had held him out to be a “sexual predator”.
Mr Moles, who was whisked away from photographers by gardaí at the Bridewell Garda station, earlier told the court he had met the unidentified prisoner’s wife outside a shop near the prison. He had later received a phone call from her.
He had developed “a liaison” with her, which had lasted for about six months. She had told him she was separated and her husband had obtained a court order to bring the children to see him in Mountjoy Prison.
He and his wife had difficulties and had separated.
For several months he had been out of work ill between August 2009 and March 2010. On his return he had gone to the governor to inform him he was seeing a woman whose husband was imprisoned. He did not know the prisoner.
Mr Moles said that when the Star story broke the next day on Saturday, April 3rd, 2010, he was suspended pending an investigation and the prisoner had been transferred to an open prison.
He said he remained suspended on pay for a year and on return had lost an annual increment.
He told Mr English in cross-examination that he was a married man who had a relationship with a married woman, the wife of a prisoner incarcerated under his control.
Mr Moles felt that while such a relationship was “uncommon” in the prison service, it had not highly compromised him in his work. He agreed with Mr English that the article was “in the main true” and had not identified him in any way nor had it described him as a sexual predator. The page one headline was true as was “Prison warder suspended in affair probe”.
Judge Linnane also dismissed Mr Moles’s application for the publication of a correction by the newspaper.