End of era for St Pat’s

It is almost 30 years since Ireland’s most famous civil servant TK Whitaker called for the closure of St Patrick’s Institution. Countless inspection reports later, allied with repeated criticism from agencies like the UN Committee Against Torture, it is finally drawing the curtain on a sorry chapter of juvenile detention in the State.

Children’s Ombudsman Emily Logan can take some satisfaction from the decision. When she first started raising concerns about conditions in St Pat’s almost a decade ago, prison officers and departmental officials were unwelcoming and dismissive. “They thought I was just this kind of liberal woman interfering with what was going on. There was a bit of sneering at my naivety for believing these thugs who have committed crimes, that they were not having a good time in St Pat’s.”

The situation couldn’t be more different today. Her office now works closely and “very constructively” both with the Inspector of Prisons Judge Michael Reilly and the Irish Prison Service, whose director general Michael Donnellan she describes as a “man of humanity”.

Only a handful of under-18s remain at St Pat’s, and these are due to be moved out before the end of the year with the completion of a new juvenile detention centre at Oberstown. After a long struggle to reform juvenile detention, says Logan, “I think we are moving to a more human rights-based approach”.

Creating a more robust system of oversight has been a key campaign of the Office of the Children’s Ombudsman (OCO). Often described as a “finishing school” for young offenders, St Patrick’s has long been associated with bullying, violence and drug addiction. Hundreds of teenagers graduated straight from its exit to Mountjoy Prison next door.

While the OCO carried out visits to St Pat’s shortly after its founding in 2004, these intensified in 2009 and 2010 when the office conducted interviews to identify issues faced by inmates. These were expressed in an art and video project, and went towards a detailed report later picked up by the UN Committee Against Torture.

One decision that was more than symbolic was to refer to the inmates as children. “They weren’t always thought of as children because they had committed crimes. That’s not unique to Ireland, it’s a very universal thing,” says Logan, “but because staff weren’t perceiving them as children they weren’t adhering to child-protection practice standards. So they weren’t reporting child-protection episodes in the same way that any other institution might to HSE.” Her office identified “immediate concerns about safety, security and child protection”, along with a broader neglect of mental health and education problems.

Officials downplayed the concerns, pointing to more positive reports at the time from the Inspector of Prisons, but the OCO argued that abuses were going unreported because of a fear of “being seen to rat” or to disclose experiences. “My biggest concern was the ramifications for children in St Pat’s of complaining were so great that they weren’t actually complaining.”

Gang violence ranked high on the concerns of inmates, along with the failure to segregate under-18s from the adult population. The OCO, however, discovered other issues that seemed very pedestrian which had a big impact on welfare.

“Prison officers were reporting poor behaviours in the evening. Why? Because they were feeding people at 5pm and then not again until 7am. Food is very important to adolescent, growing boys.”

In 2011, an order was signed ending the detention of 16-year-olds in St Pat’s; this was followed by a decision to enhance the powers of the Inspect of Prisons so he could investigate complaints in the institution. “Without banging the drum for the current Minister for Justice, I have been doing this since 2005 and it was only with the change in Government that those two orders were signed,” Logan says.

In July 2012, an anomaly preventing the OCO from investigating places of detention was removed. While she has since received complaints directly from some inmates, she stresses her office “is a mechanism of last resort. “We shouldn’t really interfere with what’s going on operationally, and there are systems that are better closer to the young people. That has worked really well. Judge Reilly and ourselves have a really good working relationship.”

There are now posters in St Patrick’s and Wheatfield advertising the work of the OCO, along with contact details, and an outreach service is planned for Oberstown.

At Wheatfield, “there is a much better culture”, partly, Logan adds, because “there are number of people there who have chosen to work with young people”.

At present, however, Wheatfield is unable to take remand prisoners. The OCO is urging Minister for Children Frances FitzGerald to amend this so the remaining juveniles at St Pat’s – all currently on remand – can be moved out.

As for the future, “we hope the Oberstown project is progressing and that all young people aged under 18 in contact with the law will be detained there, in a much more therapeutic or care environment.

“While these young people are deprived of their liberty, they’re entitled to the same health services and the same educational aspirations as children outside.”