Exclusive - Department of Justice Staff done secret deal with Prisoner

Exclusive by theirishobserver.blogspot.com

Department of Justice doing deals with Prisoners while ignoring concerns of Staff

The resignation of Prison Governor Kathleen Mc Mahon from the Dochas Centre in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison after ten years in that post and thirty-three years in the Irish Prison Service is a dark day for the Department of Justice.

Kathleen Mc Mahon is regarded as a first class professional by all those people who have had dealings with her in her role as Governor of the Dochas Centre. Kathleen Mc Mahon clearly feels that her concerns and views have not been taken seriously by senior staff in the Irish Prison Service or indeed the Department of Justice. Such undermining of Kathleen Mc Mahon’s position is nothing less than scandalous.

Kathleen Mc Mahon will leave her post as Governor on the 21st May 2010 after ten years of dedicated service in that position. Kathleen Mc Mahon has not met with glass ceilings but rather with brick walls. Kathleen Mc Mahon’s concerns about over crowding and lack of focus on rehabilitation have not been treated in the manner they should have been by those in authority.

Kathleen Mc Mahon has been one of the few to confront the Department of Justice about the chronic overcrowding and lack of facilities in the Irish Prison system. However the lack of vision for the Irish Prison system has been institutionalised over many years as Government Ministers such as John O Donoghue and senior civil servants were more concerned with their own career paths, inflated salaries and expenses than they were about public safety. Wheatfield Prison, Cork, Limerick are all over crowded and lacking any rehabilitative vision.

Many people continue to fill our prisons simply because they cannot meet repayments on small loans or cannot afford to pay over inflated fines. What is the logic of fining a woman 400 Euro for stealing a pair of 10 Euro runners from Dunnes, this is the type of ridiculous situation that is on going in our courts while corrupt bankers and property speculators continue to live in multi-million euro houses as the Government bails them out with Billions of Euro of our money.

Senior staff within the Department of Justice seems more concerned with pleasing the ghoulish appetite of tabloid editors and readers than they are with community safety and crime prevention.

However, the irishobserver.blogspot.com can reveal by way of a FOI request that both Sean Aylward and Frank Mc Dermot done a secret deal with a convicted sex offender (see, document above). So it appears that these senior members of the Justice Department are more concerned with civil proceedings by a prisoner than they are about the concerns of a senior professional within their own ranks.