Alison O’Connor: The prison manager who helped confine Covid jail deaths to just one

The Irish Prison Service's contact-tracing model is being used across the world

Just before Christmas 2019 Emmett Conroy, National Infection Control Manager at the Irish Prison Service (IPS) told his immediate boss in the Irish Prison Service this new virus coming out of China was something they needed to be concerned about. Picture: Don Moloney

Ireland’s first national Covid lockdown was announced by then taoiseach Leo Varadkar on March 27, 2020. But by then the man responsible for infection control in Irish prisons had not only been warning his colleagues about this new virus for three months, but had also persuaded his boss to allow him to buy truckloads of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Nationally, we have lost almost 8,000 people to Covid. Incredibly, though, just one person in an Irish prison has died from the virus, an extraordinary record compared to prisons internationally. This week, there were around 4,200 people in Irish prisons.