Prisoners on best behaviour get to swap cell block for garden shop

Will he be nice? Will he know what to do? What if we say the wrong thing?

For we are people from the free world and have crossed the invisible barriers into what is for most on the outside, a frightening, unknown world of captivity.

We order teas and coffees, scones and — go on, so — a donut for the road. He serves them all up quickly, neatly wrapping the donut in some napkins, apologetic that he has no takeaway bags.

It’s quiet now but will get busier at midday, he assures us, mainly with locals and visitors.

Do they get many tourists? No, he replies, looking puzzled, and we kick ourselves.

Seated outside at a picnic table, Lough MacNean shimmers below, Fermanagh on the far horizon. Dark green conifers sway behind us. Two older men chat over coffee nearby. A young man in shorts walks purposefully over and back, speaking on the phone with the calm authority of a team leader advising a younger colleague.

Another inmate whizzes past in a forklift towards a huge shed piled high with pallets. Something keeps nudging me in the back. It’s the prison pet Lexi, a beautiful collie. She plops a teeny stick at our feet, ready to play her daily game of fetch-the-coffee-stirrer.

Afterwards, we stroll into the huge polytunnels housing rows and rows of multi-coloured flowers.

“Ye have some amount of flowers here,” an elderly Cavan couple tell a prisoner. “Any geraniums?”

“I have no idea, this is only my second day here,” he laughs. “All I know is they are green and they are flowers,” he says, pointing at some begonias and running off to find an answer.

Another man points out all the various prices of pot plants in an accent straight off Moore St. He shows off some planters made by his fellow inmates from repurposed wooden pallets.

A blowtorch gives them an elegant finish and protects the wood, he shares, but they aren’t allowed the gas needed anymore, he adds wistfully.

He’s a lad from Dublin’s inner-city who has found himself in Loughan House Open Prison, in a remote corner of north Cavan, just 3km from the village of Blacklion and the border.

It is one of only two such prisons in the country — the other being Shelton Abbey in Wicklow — housing, as of this week, 148 carefully selected male prisoners, 10 of whom are currently on temporary release.

The men are usually coming to the end of a long sentence served in a closed prison elsewhere, mostly for drugs-related crimes; no sex-offenders. 

The men who have brought about the death of another are ironically called 'lifers', and are the least likely to re-offend, according to prison insiders

Previous inmates include former IRA chief Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, and former Anglo-Irish Bank chief David Drumm.

Time flies for those working in the polytunnels and this is their busiest time of year. Prisoners get a chance to engage with customers browsing the flowers, while many are also getting their car washed.

“Dealing with the public is great,” says ‘Frank’ in one of the Loughan House podcasts. “For the likes of me, this is the place to be. You’re putting your best foot forward, keeps you out of mischief as well. Bit of craic with the customers, it’s good,” he says.

This is a man’s world. The humour is black and always there. There are gold chains and tattoos — lots of tattoos. They sport shorts year-round, even in the depths of winter. 

While the men are relaxed, they all walk with a sense of purpose, not menace. They have been selected on the basis of good behaviour inside their closed prison and want to take every opportunity available before their release.

A taste of freedom

Inside Loughan House, the men attend school, pass a Junior Cert perhaps, or, like Frank, complete an Open University degree in Business Management.

There are cookery classes — TV Chef Neven Maguire often gives work experience in his restaurant nearby. Narcotics Anonymous meetings are held inside and counselling offered. 

Many are regular gymgoers and are now so health conscious they won’t even take sugar, according to an Irish Prison Service (IPS) source.

There are parenting courses to help fathers and workshops to create crafts for their annual Christmas market

They are heavily involved in volunteering and charity work in the surrounding counties of Sligo, Leitrim, and Cavan, and are regularly released for the day to do up bikes for Africa, planting, painting, and decorating for the Tidy Towns Competition. They raise heifers for the Bóthar charity. Some cycle in to work in Blacklion, returning back in the evening.

“I feel like as if I’m out, which I am, but I’m still in jail. It’s after helping me, to be fair. When I get out, I’ll go back to work anyway. It’s a bit of normality,” says ‘Greg’.

The Fermanagh GAA football team often comes in for a game and rather oddly, the facility is a popular haunt for Cavan school tours.

The serene 47-acre grounds are a far cry from the volatile environment of constantly overcrowded closed prisons where gang violence regularly breaks out and inmates live on a knife edge.

Here, the prisoners self-regulate, says an IPS source. If an officer is attacked, he’s more likely to be saved by other prisoners.

It’s not for everyone. The men are still subject to random urine analysis — carried out by someone affectionately called “the piss taker”. Those who fail are sent back to closed prison.

The hardest part of Loughan House, though, is remembering you’re still a prisoner despite the taste of freedom.

“I see a lot of lads coming down here and they kind of think they’re out the gap, but nearly every week there’s lads going back because they forget they’re in a prison,” says Frank.

A Munster open prison

Another challenge is the location. Many inmates in Loughan hail from Cork and Kerry, not exactly within easy reaching distance for family visits. There is a case to be made for opening a third open prison in the Munster region to allow prisoners maintain family contact, according to some IPS staff.

There have been no loud calls from the families for this to happen, although as one Cork TD pointed out, this does not mean the demand isn’t there.

Relatives of inmates are not known for lobbying politicians or speaking up for their rights

“Prisoners shouldn’t be forced to serve sentences big distances away from the support of family,” says People Before Profit-Solidarity TD for Cork North Central Mick Barry.

Sinn Féin spokesperson on Justice and Kerry TD Pa Daly agrees: “Family visitation rights are important for rehabilitation, as well as for not engaging in secondary punishment for families who have committed no crime.”

A third open prison?

Internationally, there is a growing move away from large prison institutions towards smaller detention houses.

On June 14, the ministers for justice of the 27 EU countries unanimously expressed their support for detention houses. The Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) applauded the move.

“Open prisons offer a more humane approach by providing people in prison with greater freedom and responsibility, which helps prepare them for life after release,” a spokesperson told the Irish Examiner.

Mr Barry supports improved resourcing of prison services, but says “a debate about greater use of the open prison model should clearly be part of this conversation”.

However, Mr Daly believes that services within closed prisons are “just as important as resourcing more open prisons”.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice told this newspaper that there are currently “no plans to open a third open centre, however work will commence shortly on the construction of modular units at both locations to provide an additional 10 spaces at each [open] prison”.

Of the 5,002 people in state custody as of June 20, just 230 men were in open prisons, or 4.6%.

“That’s very, very low by European standards,” says Maynooth University assistant professor in criminology Ian Marder. He has no doubt that a much larger proportion of our prison population could qualify for an open prison. 

In other European countries, as much as 30% of prisoners are in open prisons

Justice Minister Helen McEntee drew the ire of the criminology community last April when she allocated €49.5m to build prison spaces for up to 670 more prisoners.

“They’ve just thrown in tonnes of money to build prisons and it’s not going on open prisons. From a criminological perspective, we would support a greater proportion of people being in an open prison
but we wouldn’t necessarily support increasing prison capacity to enable that,” says Mr Marder, who was
one of 45 criminology academics and politicians who wrote an open letter to the Irish Times criticising the plan.

He believes community-based justice could replace the use of prisons for the vast majority of inmates. 

It’s all well and good to look for more open prisons, but where’s the evidence that they actually work? There’s very little published, but it’s reasonable to hypothesise that “an open prison would have a positive effect on desistance,” says Mr Marder.

There is no open prison for women prisoners, which the Irish Penal Reform Trust describes as “an equality issue that should be addressed with urgency”.

A Department of Justice spokesperson said a Joint Probation Service/IPS working group had considered developing an open centre for women, but concluded “it was more appropriate to develop and use step-down facilities” like those run by Focus Ireland and Depaul Ireland in conjunction with the Probation Services.

A 2022 commitment to set up a penal policy consultative council to give independent advice to the minister on matters relating to penal policy has still not been implemented.

Mr Marder agrees but also points out that many women prisoners wouldn’t even be there in the first place if they had the right mental health and addiction services.

“If you look at the backgrounds of women in prison, they are overwhelmingly victims of severe violence and serious crime themselves.

“The number of women in prison for very minor crimes is extremely high. Instead of having access to high-quality mental health and addiction services, women go to prison. So, while I agree that yes, there should be an open prison for women, women’s prison conditions should be better than they are now. I would caveat that with they really, overwhelmingly, shouldn’t be there in the first place. That also applies to men.”