What Lonergan will miss most about the ‘Joy’ is the craic

ODD as it sounds, what John Lonergan will miss most about Mountjoy is the craic.

The prison may have a reputation as a Dickensian lock-up for miserable miscreants scarred by drug addiction and deprivation, but Lonergan says the place was never short of a joke.

“I’ll miss the interaction with people – the staff and the prisoners – and the craic and humour that you’d have,” he says.

What the 62-year-old Tipperary native won’t miss, however, is the daily worry and frustration about the conditions in which he had to work for most of the 26 years he spent in the ironically nicknamed “Joy”.

“I don’t think anybody can deny or disagree with the fact that Mountjoy is 20, 30, 40 years past its sell-by date. The prison was built in 1850, it’s still the biggest prison in the country and it has the biggest population of drug-addicted prisoners.

“Twenty-five years ago it needed to be refurbished, rebuilt or replaced. There is a limit to the time you can continue to work without any sort of decent facilities.

“We’ve over 250 prisoners on methadone every day and who need to be supported to remain drug-free. But we have 570 prisoners who do not have basic washing and sanitation facilities, and that’s not a supportive environment.”

The ex-governor has been saying this much for years and Mountjoy has been tinkered with here and there, but longstanding plans to virtually reconstruct it on site were never seriously entertained by successive governments.

And once the then-justice minister, Michael McDowell, decided seven years ago to build a new prison at Thornton Hall in north Co Dublin, it was clear no more money was going to be poured into the Joy.

In the meantime, the demands on the prison have increased and there are projections that the prisoner population there will reach 700 this year.

“We’ve already had a 25% increase in the last two years and the projections are for the numbers to increase further,” Lonergan says. “That means huge pressure on the prison, every day, seven days a week. There is no let-up – prison is 24-hours.”

To make matters worse, Mountjoy has been hit with the same cutbacks and recruitment moratoriums as the rest of the public service. “A lot of vacancies have not been filled, especially some of the supervisor and management grades.”

Restrictions to the controversial high-cost overtime working arrangements in recent years also meant the governor couldn’t call in extra staff whenever the prison became extra busy.

“We don’t have the flexibility of being able to call people at short notice the way we used to so there would be occasions when the prison would be running with a shortage of staff,” he says.

“But the biggest concern would be that the day-do-day requirements of the prisoners and staff are not being met. A prison with 670 people is a village – bigger than many villages in fact – and all those people have a huge number of basic, practical needs, never mind the specialist needs prisoners have.”

Lonergan says he has no definite plans for what he will do next, although he is much in demand as a speaker to schools and community organisations and was in Kenmare speaking with students and parents the day after his retirement announcement.

He says retirement will give him the opportunity to explore other interests. But even though he has already said his goodbyes, as he is on holidays that run up to his official retirement date next month, he still speaks about Mountjoy in the present tense and it is obvious that while he has cleared his desk, he hasn’t cleared the prison from his mind.

Never one to be sensationalist, he is reluctant to go down the road of saying one day the strains on Mountjoy will prove too much, but he concedes he has concerns.

“Prison is always a volatile place and you could never predict what will happen. Generally speaking, taking everything into account, Mountjoy has been relatively peaceful, but you can certainly never predict the future and numbers and pressure like that certainly does not help the situation.”