Baby Black will have playmates as she starts life behind bars

BRINGING up a baby girl in a prison is far from ideal. Especially when mother and child will eventually be separated, perhaps for years.

So what can convicted killer Una Black — beginning her nine-year jail sentence this week — expect when her daughter is born, essentially behind bars?

Her child, to be named Nicole, will not be alone in the women’s prison, the Dóchas Centre. The child will be the third born into and living there in just a matter of months.

Sources confirmed to the Irish Examiner yesterday that two children have been born to inmates so far this year.

One is a four-week-old girl whose mother is Venezuelan, while the other is a six-month-old girl whose mother is from Cork. Both are living with their mothers at the Dóchas Centre, along with more than 90 other female inmates.

Black killed her neighbour, John Malone, outside their flats in Mervue, Galway, in 2006 with a single stab wound to the chest after a row over a puppy.

The 26-year-old, who is eight months pregnant, began her nine-year-sentence for manslaughter this week. Black’s mother, Geraldine, denied on radio this week that her daughter had become pregnant to gain sympathy during her trial.

Black will likely go to the nearby Rotunda for the birth, according to prison sources. There are nurses and a qualified midwife at the Dóchas Centre.

The centre differs from the main Mountjoy Prison in that the women live in apartment-like settings, not cells. Black is staying in a drug-free area, in an en-suite room. There are seven housing complexes in the jail, each with 12 bedrooms.

It might not be ideal but the birth will not be the last at the jail — in fact a study last year called for a specialist baby unit in prisons.

The report found 14 babies had lived in the jail since 2003. Five were born to women pregnant on admission while the others were brought in by their mothers.

It concluded a formal system was needed to plan the admission, stay and discharge of babies, with links to health and child protection schemes.

The report, Babies Behind Bars, by Wexford General Hospital’s Dr Francis Enright, found children stayed in prison for periods of between two days and three months. While a variety of services like education and healthcare were available for both mother and child, the report warned of some hazards, including the fact that up to 50% of the women were on methadone while some had HIV.

Controversy surrounded attempts by murderer Charlotte Mulhall last year to care for her infant boy in prison after she was given a life sentence for the savage murder of her mother’s Kenyan partner.

Black will have 12 months with her baby before they are separated. Her mother said this week she would care for her granddaughter and regularly visit the prison.

“When the child is taken from Una, she knows that I’ll be there with her every day. And Una knows I will bring her up to the prison every day,” Geraldine Black said. She added: “At the end of the day she is still her mother and that’s the way I look at it.”