Inside Man: Life As An Irish Prison Officer

By Philip Bray

In 1977, Philip Bray joined the Irish prison service, working in Limerick Prison. At the time, prisons were places where pillows, blankets and even food were scarce. Most prisoners were illiterate and luxuries such as televisons and books were unheard of. Over the following thirty years, Philip bore witness to dramatic changes in the prison service.
Inside Man is an account of life inside Ireland's first female high-security prison in Limerick – a place where wealthy Englishwoman-come-IRA-operative Rose Dugdale's pregnancy infamously went unnoticed and feuding gangland families shared cells with the 'Dublin Mafia', whose imprisonment fuelled a violent protest.
An account of a career lived at the epicentre of Ireland's turbulent recent decades, Inside Man was the winner of The Tubridy Show / Gill True Story competition in May 2007, seeing off almost 2000 other entrants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Sep 19, 2008
• ISBN: 9780717160280

Philip Bray

Philip Bray retired in May 2007 after serving for over 30 years as a prison guard in Limerick jail. His account of a career spent in the prison service is more than a diverting memoir; it's an account of Ireland's turbulent recent decades from the perspective of those charged with enforcing the law.

Book preview

Chapter 1

‘I’ve Lost the Pulse…’

Iwas just a year in prison when I came across my first suicide, and it was traumatic. Every prison suicide attracts great media attention, but the truth is that it doesn’t happen that often. And nothing can prepare you for it.

That night, I was working outside. It was boring work, patrolling areas where you didn’t see anyone for hours on end. The quietness and monotony can get in on you and you welcome any distraction. I was almost relieved when I heard shouting. It was around 1 a.m. and I still had several hours to put in.

I ran around the side of the prison until I was under the wall of D Class, and I could see two prisoners yelling through the window.

‘Let us out, for fuck’s sake! Hurry, Officer!’ They were screaming, their panic unmistakable.

I ran straight to the safe room and told the Assistant Chief Officer we had an emergency in D Class. I grabbed the keys and ran to D as fast as I could.

The officer in charge of D was down the landing, trying to peer into a four-man cell.

‘What’s going on, Eddie?’ I yelled.

‘I don’t know, I can’t see through the spyhole.’

The two prisoners who had called to me outside were up against the door, banging and shouting, and we couldn’t see past them into the cell. We ordered them to stand back, but we might as well have been shouting at the sea. They kept pounding on the door, demanding to be let out. They were begging, pleading, screaming.

The first thought that crosses your mind in a situation like that is that it could be an escape attempt. The two prisoners were English and had been working as scaffolders at the Alcan plant in Askeaton. They were fit and strong and I didn’t fancy tackling them in the narrow, dark landing.

I went around to the side of the cell, where there was another, larger peephole. Looking in, I could see the two panicked men beating on the cell door. The three beds were empty. There was an ominous shape hanging from the light fitting in the centre of the cell.

‘Open the door, Eddie!’ I screamed.

The two Englishmen tumbled out, completely terrified. We opened another three-man cell and bundled the cowering men in on top of three sleepy inmates who hadn’t a clue what was happening.

I was the first to enter the first cell. The prisoner was dangling from the light in the centre, eerily still. I could see that he had made a noose from strips of sheets and had used that to hang himself. I immediately grabbed him by the waist and tried to work on the knot at the light with my free hand. I must have yanked, because, at that moment, the rope broke.

I’ve heard the expression ‘dead weight’, but wasn’t prepared for the reality. He was unbelievably heavy. Try as I might, I couldn’t hold him and he slipped through my hands to the floor, landing with a thump and hitting his head.

I bent down and turned him to check him. This was not my thing – I know nothing about medicine. I tried for a pulse, but couldn’t find one. I looked at Eddie – what could I do? Anything was better than nothing. I had seen chest compressions done on the telly and thought I had nothing to lose. I couldn’t make it any worse for him, so I got on my knees beside him and began a few chest compressions. Eddie grabbed his hand.

‘I’ve got a pulse – keep it up,’ he encouraged.

The prisoner wasn’t breathing. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was a new thing to me, but I knew the theory. I had to give it a go. Holding his nose, I blew into his mouth. Nothing happened, so I blew harder. Still nothing. His airway was completely blocked. I began to blow in very sharply, hoping to overcome the obstruction. A stream of snot sprayed out of his nose, covering the side of my face. No matter. I kept at it, blowing away, feeling the snot run down the side of my face.

‘I’ve lost the pulse,’ said Eddie.

I switched to chest compressions again, pumping on his ribcage vigorously, then back to the mouth to mouth.

‘Anything, Eddie?’

‘Nothing. I haven’t had a pulse for a while now.’

I was kneeling in the middle of his cell. ‘What do we do now?’

Eddie just looked at me, then, after a few seconds, knelt beside me and began whispering a prayer in the ear of the dead man. I stood and looked around the cell. It wasn’t difficult. There on the bed was a suicide note, addressed to the man’s family.

I remembered him. He had been inside only a few days, on remand awaiting trial. It was so tragic. After a fight with his wife, he had thrown her out of the house. When she returned with the police, he had taken his mother-in-law hostage and was holding her against the upstairs window, a knife against her throat. He threatened to kill her if the police came in.

After a four-hour standoff, the man had relented, giving up his hostage and surrendering to the police. That had been less than a week ago. Now, he was dead.

The doctor arrived and told us officially what we already knew. The governor, who lived in the prison at the time, was also quickly on the scene. An ambulance was called. One came from the fire station down the road from the prison and removed the body. I knew one of the firemen – he went to the same scuba club as I did.

‘This is my first time in the prison,’ he said. ‘How do you put up with the smell?’

‘What smell?’ I asked him.

He just looked at me incredulously.

After everyone was gone, I had to write up a report on the night’s events. Then, it was back outside to complete my patrolling. I was on my own outside for the rest of the night and my head was spinning. It was all so sad.

Eventually, morning came and I drove home, glad to fall into bed for the day. That evening, I woke up and saw my wife’s dressing gown hanging from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. The door was white and the dark fabric of the gown hanging there began to unnerve me. I got up and moved the gown to the wardrobe, then unscrewed the hook from the back of the door before going back to bed. My wife noticed the hook had gone, but I never offered an explanation. That was the way back then; prison officers never spoke about the job.

Meanwhile, life returned to its normal routine in the prison. The two Englishmen were transferred within a couple of days to a prison in Dublin. This led to problems – a rumour went around the prison that if you were in a cell and one of your cellmates took his own life, you would immediately be released, no matter how much of your sentence remained. We laughed at first, then the implications began to dawn on us. The prisoners really believed this rumour, and it was only a matter of time before someone decided to test it by hanging one of his cellmates. We went to great lengths to let everyone know that the two Englishmen had merely been transferred.

The Gardaí carried out a full investigation into the suicide, and of course I was interviewed. This was several weeks after the event, but I could still recall all the details. They went through my statement thoroughly, but there was one small detail they weren’t happy with. Finally, it came out.

‘This looks open and shut,’ said one. ‘But there is one small detail that we aren’t happy about. Why was the prisoner wearing someone else’s underwear?’

‘How in heaven’s name do you know they weren’t his?’

‘Because someone else’s initials were on them.’

‘Whose?’

‘Someone called P.S.’

I burst out laughing. ‘That stands for prison service.’ Every item of a prisoner’s clothing was stamped with P.S.

With that, the file was closed.

The inquest was held a few months later. It was my first time attending a Coroner’s Court and it was more formal than I had expected. I was questioned by a barrister. Brendan Nix is a bit of a superstar in local legal circles, Limerick’s own Rumpole. He has a razor-sharp mind, and if I was ever in trouble, he would be the man I would want in my corner. If I was ever trying to fudge testimony and get away with something, he is the last man I would want to face. Luckily, I knew the truth about that night in the prison and had nothing to hide. We had done our best for the suicide victim.

Just before I took the stand, a Garda told me that the two English prisoners had changed their testimony. They were now claiming that they had banged on the door for half an hour before anyone came to their assistance, and that if we had acted faster the victim could still be alive. I don’t know what they thought they would gain by lying; it wouldn’t shorten their sentence and I couldn’t see that they were getting at anyone.

Pondering this, I was called to the witness box. I refused the Bible, which surprised the coroner, but he allowed me to take the civil alternative when I explained that I have no religion.

Brendan Nix took me carefully through my evidence. He put it to me that the two prisoners sharing the cell with the deceased were claiming that our excessive delays had led to his death.

‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘We got there as quickly as possible, certainly within minutes.’

‘Are you saying the prisoners are lying? What would they gain by lying?’

That was a route I wasn’t going down. Instead, I explained that the two men were in a panicked state, they had no clock in the cell and their sense of time must have been distorted. But even if our response time had been slow – which it wasn’t – why didn’t they help the poor victim? Why didn’t they try and take him down and save his life?

At this point, I looked at the two Englishmen and asked them directly: ‘Why did you not help that poor man?’

They hung their heads and made no answer. In fact, they didn’t look at me for the rest of my evidence. Behind them, I could see the mother of the deceased, her head in her hands as she sobbed.

The inquest rejected the evidence of the two prisoners, who were returned to Dublin to complete their sentences. Later, one of them succeeded in escaping from Mountjoy.

The inquest over, we went to the pub for a few pints and as the drink flowed, the sense seemed to flow out of Eddie. He felt I had let down the entire prison service by not swearing on a Bible, and he was quick to tell me so.

‘Those bloody Brits spent eight hundred years trying to crush the Irish and our language and religion, and in your case they succeeded,’ he said. ‘I would die before renouncing my faith.’ From this, he moved on to conspiracy theories. I listened to a couple of hours of rubbish from him – I even goaded him into more and more outlandish statements as the drink brought out the crackpot in him. By the end of the night, he was trying to convince me that the two prisoners who had lied on the stand were sent over to cause trouble for Charlie Haughey.

There might have been a bit of a crackpot in Eddie – there is in all of us – but there was no badness. I was glad he was with me on the night of my first suicide. He was a big, strong man who would flinch from no one, and if the two prisoners had been trying to escape that night, they had picked the wrong crew to try it on. But that isn’t why I was glad he was there. It was humbling to see this gentle giant of a man kneeling down, head bowed, as he whispered prayers into the ear of a dead man in a dirty prison cell. I was glad that not everyone in the cell was a pagan like me.

I’m sorry that the parents and family of the deceased were never made aware of this act of Christian kindness shown to their son by a man some would see as a big, thick jailer. He was big, but he had a big heart to go with it.

He was one of many wonderful and life-affirming characters I met in my thirty years behind bars. Not all of those wonderful characters worked with me – some were locked up by me. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Chapter 2

Welcome to Limerick Prison

On a Saturday morning at eight o’clock while all my mates were having a lie-in with their wives, I was standing in front of Limerick Prison. It was March 1977 and the cold was biting. I stood before a big wire gate waiting for it to open, but nothing happened. Then a voice called from my left and an officer beckoned to me.

‘In this way,’ he said, and I walked over to him. ‘Everyone comes in this way, except visitors. I presume you are the new officer?’

‘Yes, starting today. What’s the score?’

‘I’ll tell you while I search you. Everyone from the governor down is searched when they come in.’

I emptied my pockets onto a table and got a rubdown search.

‘Go up to the main gate and ring the bell at the side. Welcome to Limerick Prison.’

The gate was a huge wooden structure with a small picket door on the right-hand side. A small hatch slid open and someone looked out, then the picket door opened.

‘Come in. You’re the new man. We’re waiting for you.’

I followed him into a small office. The heat hit me like a furnace. There was a small fireplace, but it was packed with as much coal as could be crammed into it.

‘Nice and warm in here,’ I said, trying to make conversation.

‘It’s the only place in the prison that’s warm,’ he said, but he wasn’t getting much time to enjoy it. In the few minutes I was there, he opened and closed gates, made entries into a huge book on the desk and made numerous notes in other, smaller books scattered around. An electric buzzer called him to the main gate, then someone was tapping on the inner gate. This guy was kept going.

‘OK, the ACO is waiting to take you to the governor’s office. Welcome to Limerick Prison.’

It took two men to open the inner gate, each with his own key. I had already met the main gate man. On the other side was the inner gate man. The gate opened and I stepped into Limerick Prison for the first time. Facing me was a large tower with two three-storey wings coming off the tower at an angle. On the left were rows of windows with bars on them. The right was similar, but with ‘office’ written in old Irish letters on the bottom right. A lot of the windows were without glass as far as I could see. A concrete footpath lined with flowerbeds led straight to the door at the bottom of the tower. This was the circle. The wings were D and C Class. A and B Class were wings running from the back of the circle.

‘My name is Bill Black,’ said the ACO (assistant chief officer). He had a single gold stripe on each shoulder. ‘We’ll go over to the governor’s office and get you organised.’

We turned right. The inner gate man opened a picket gate and we stepped into the governor’s small garden. At the end of the garden was a beautiful stone-cut detached house. It would have been stunning placed on a few acres of rolling countryside; instead it was crammed into a corner of the prison. The downstairs had been turned into offices. As we walked in a magnificent staircase faced us and the landing was dominated by a huge fifteen-foot window, arched at the top and with stained glass running down the sides. But the view it framed was of a grey prison wall, just six feet away.

Most of our jails were built by the British, as were our courthouses and psychiatric hospitals, most of our hospitals and many of our schools. I could imagine a request from the authorities in Ireland to their superiors in the colonial office in London to be supplied with the designs for a house suitable for someone of the rank and status of governor – and they’d sent over the plans for a country squire’s house. It was a folly like the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, and about as out of place.

The governor lived upstairs. At that time, he lived there on his own while his family lived in Cork. Back then, a governor was required to live in. Previous governors had raised their families in this house and the chief officer had lived over the main gate with his family.

‘Welcome to Limerick Prison. Sit down.’ The governor was a small, neat, well-dressed man and he had a hat in his hand. ‘I’m just on the way out, but I’m glad to meet you. If you have any problems, just let me or the chief know and we will work them out.’

I didn’t want to start our relationship on the wrong foot, but I had something that I needed to clear up.

‘Governor, you might put my mind to rest on a matter. My wife and I recently had our first child die at six months old. We’re expecting a baby in July, and you can understand how worried we are. I know that there’s an overtime issue in the summer and I wonder if you could allow me a few days off at short notice at the time of the birth?’

‘No problem, Mr Bray. Just mention it to the chief, who you’ll meet in a few minutes.’ Then he shook hands with me and left.

The ACO brought me out of the office and up to the prison. We mounted the steps, pushed open a wooden door and entered a twenty-foot narrow landing. At the end was an officer standing beside a gate, the circle gate. He opened the gate and we entered the prison proper.

‘Welcome to Limerick Prison,’ he said.

I was in a large circle that rose nearly forty feet, with two landings stretching off on either side. That’s where the cells were, in those three-storey blocks. It was eerily quiet. Looking at the building that hadn’t changed since 1821, except for a couple of hanging light bulbs and the odd lick of paint, I had the disturbing feeling that I hadn’t just stepped through a gate, I had stepped back in time.

‘Where are the prisoners?’

‘They’re all out in the yards on exercise, but you’ll see them soon enough.’

Then the smell hit me. It smelled exactly like the lion house in Dublin Zoo, that acrid, sharp smell of urine that caught in your throat.

‘What’s that smell?’ I asked.

‘What smell?’ he replied. I thought he was joking.

The ACO offered to show me around. We turned right and went into B Class. The farther down B Class I went, the stronger the smell got. It was coming from the toilet at the end. But the cells also stank because piss was being spilled on a regular basis and had seeped through the floorboards. While working nights, it wasn’t unusual to hear a muffled oath and a clatter as a prisoner stumbled over his piss pot and knocked it over in the dark. Body odour and stale tobacco completed the smell that was Limerick Prison.

We turned back and crossed the circle to A Class, which was just as bad. I looked into one cell with an open door. A prisoner who was sitting on the bed looked up at me.

‘Hello, Officer,’ he said.

I was a bit embarrassed to have invaded his privacy and I turned away. I was to become very used to invading people’s privacy over the coming years. The cell was bare, cold and sparsely furnished and contained no personal items.

Then, we went out to the yard and I saw the prisoners. They crammed the yard because it was a Saturday and they had no work. They looked miserable. That was a bitterly cold winter. I remember it well because the water pump in my car froze on a number of occasions. The prisoners were walking anticlockwise around the yard in groups of three or four. Every group of prisoners I have ever seen – here, in Britain or in the States – have walked anticlockwise. I don’t know why.

At that time, there were only two exercise yards, one for convicted prisoners and the other for remand prisoners. This was the first time I had seen anyone who had been in jail. All these prisoners were smaller than me, I think through undernourishment. They were all lean and thin and none of them wore shirts, even though they were issued with them. They all wore jeans, a vest (string at the time) and a v-neck pullover. Many of the clothes were ill fitting.

They were a dreary, cold, bored-looking bunch. There was one officer in the yard, on his own among them, standing beside what I was told was an alarm bell. In the centre of the yard was a bare patch of earth, not concreted over, and on that were several large tree trunks. Across the way was a lean-to shed where some prisoners huddled. There was a long bench along one wall, but most prisoners were on their haunches, playing cards. They were playing don, a card game I had never heard of before. The stakes were pinches of shag tobacco, which they placed on the ground to bet. Beside them, a couple of tons of wooden blocks were neatly arranged for firewood.

I was then brought down to D Class, where the remand prisoners were held. In theory, they were innocent and were awaiting either trial or sentence, or they were in contempt of court or were debtors. D Class was a revelation to me. It seemed more dilapidated, unkempt, uncared for and colder than any other part of the prison. The best way I could describe it was as an upstairs dungeon.

Stone steps led up to the second-floor landing. I could see something leaking from around the toilet, going across the floor and seeping down the stairs. That seepage remained there until they knocked D Class down twenty years later. The landings of D Class were like a maze, and it took me a long time to figure out where things were. There were a couple of four-man cells which originally housed debtors. A debtor was treated separately from other prisoners in that he could carry on his trade inside, employ other prisoners to clean and tidy for him and order out for his food and even for drink. He had a fireplace and some space. I could see the fireplaces were bricked, and four men shared the cell instead of one. A huge bolt and padlock secured those doors. I learned later that those bolts and padlocks were the original ones, from 1821.

Reception and C Class were next. Reception was on the ground floor of C Class. The upstairs in C Class was semi-derelict, and only two or three cells were used to house prisoners who were admitted late at night. Reception housed the only shower in the prison. There was a bath in D Class, but I never saw it used. There was a bath in the women’s prison, and obviously I never saw that used either.

That first day passed in a haze. There was a bewildering array of different duties, different starting times and different knocking-off times. This was clearly no nine-to-five job. It crossed my mind that I would need a secretary just to keep track of what I was supposed to be doing. Instead, I got a diary. I still have every diary from my thirty years of service.

I was on A2 landing when the prisoners came in from the yards. A group of them came towards me. The landing was only a few feet wide and I stood frozen, expecting to be bumped around the place, but they all passed me without touching me. I couldn’t believe it. It was like a shoal of fish passing a scuba diver. They would pass over you, under you and around you, but not one of them would rub off you.

I had