Ali Afshari talks to Deaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Like a character from the pages of Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's classic novel about a Soviet dissident forced to testify against himself, Iranian political activist Ali Afshari says he was tortured and brainwashed until he agreed to make a false public confession of his "misdeeds" on television.
In this country where so many people do not bother to vote in elections, it is salutary to meet a young man who risks everything for basic democratic rights taken for granted in Ireland.
Still only 32, Afshari has lived several lifetimes already and seen more of the dark side of humanity than most of us would wish to contemplate. Yet he is cheerful, almost jolly, and his face only clouds over when he talks about his prison experiences.
Only six years old - "a little baby," as he puts it - when the Shah of Iran was overthrown, Afshari is an engineer by profession and represents a new, well-educated generation of Iranians, eager for reform and true democracy and all the good things that were expected to come after the revolution, but didn't. "There is a gap between government and people," he says simply.
He became a student leader at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran in the mid-1990s and co-ordinated the student wing of the election campaign on behalf of the reformist Mohammad Khatami.
Khatami was Iran's president from 1997 until last August, when he was succeed by hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
There were major student protests in Iran in 1999 and the following year Afshari participated in a conference of Iranian dissidents, including exiles, in Berlin. On his return home, he was arrested and imprisoned, from November 2000 to December 2001.
He says he was beaten regularly, deprived of sleep and warned to "think of your family". He claims he was "brainwashed" and as a result of this combination of physical and mental pressure, he agreed to denounce his own past on television in 2001.
After his release, he called a press conference to announce that the confession was false. As a result he was jailed for a further 18 months and released in 2003. All told, he has spent a total of 400 days in solitary confinement.
"Recently I got a new sentence," he says. Last August he was sentenced to a further six years for opposition activities. He was allowed to go abroad pending the result of an appeal but, if the sentence is confirmed, he will return to serve his time, otherwise the family home where his parents live in Tehran would be confiscated.
He is currently studying English here, on a fellowship from the Blackrock-based human rights defenders' support group Front Line. He travels to the US at the weekend to begin a three-year PhD course in engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston but says he will have to return home forthwith if the sentence is upheld.
He claims the authorities in Iran have "a whole room" filled with files about himself and his activities, the most recent of which is 800 pages in length.
Asked if he is not afraid to give an interview to The Irish Times, he responds cheerfully that he has nothing left to lose and that it will be yet another document on his voluminous file back home.
The National Assembly of the Bahais of Ireland has expressed its "deep concern" at the unexplained death of a Bahai who has spent 10 years in an Iranian jail because of his refusal to recant his religious beliefs.
Dhabihu'llah Mahrami (59) was held in prison in Yazd "under harsh physical conditions" until his death on December 15th.