Mick Clifford: Criminal justice system's blind indifference to human suffering

Mark Lawlor’s violent death is likely to elicit recommendations on how better to do things in the future but there have been many before, and the future looks no better

Mark Lawlor, who died in his prison cell in Cloverhill Prison, in November 2019. PIC: Collins Courts

The man who would go on to kill once went on a rampage in a church in Co Louth. Michael Connolly was smoking a lot of cannabis at the time. In the church he did damage to religious iconography to the value of €8,000. Later, when he was staying at a B&B in Dundalk, he burned a good portion of the room. He said he did it because he believed the HSE and the government were run by “Zionists”. He told psychiatrists that two cats in the guesthouse had informed him that he was staying in “Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam”.

Quite obviously, Michael Connolly had very serious mental health issues. One medical report described him as displaying paranoid delusions of a religious homophobic, quasi-Nazi and antisemitic nature. On the night he killed Mark Lawlor, Michael Connolly was 51. He was originally from Dublin, had moved to Louth and ended up of no fixed abode.