From where I stand on Dublin’s North Circular Road, I have to stretch my head in an awkward position to even attempt to look up past the high wall that separates the inmates of Mountjoy prison and those on the outside.

Yet, apparently, some relatives and friends of those same prisoners are flouting the law and throwing drugs and sim cards over that same wall to their waiting contacts on the other side.
It’s a major problem for the prison authorities says governor of Mountjoy prison John Longeran, who revealed that, as we speak in March of 2007, some 200 mobile phones have already been confiscated.

“Our biggest scourge here would be drugs being thrown in over the wall from the North Circular Road,” he says from the confines of his office at the top of the prison building. “It’s a big problem though it does at times depend on who is in and who is out and who had contacts at any one time.

“Another massive problem is sim cards and mobile phones– last year over 600 mobile phones were confiscated and this year alone 200 were confiscated. It’s causing us great difficulty.”
Walking through the bright, modern corridors of the female wing of Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison in the inner city, I can’t help wondering what Annie Walsh, the only woman to be hanged in Mountjoy Prison, might have made of the facilities here today.

All around me are her twenty-first century contemporaries who serve their time with the welcome benefits of a modern educational unit, a well-equipped library, stimulating workshops, a hairdressing salon, a health care centre, a pre-release facility and a central kitchen and dining room, surely a far cry from the modest surroundings in which she served her sentence for the murder of her husband back in 1928.

Capital punishment may no longer be lawful in Ireland but Annie’s presence is very much with me as I pay a visit to the heavily-guarded Mountjoy prison this morning and see just where she lost her life in the still-present execution chamber where her body now lies at last in peace.

What is now the Dochas Centre (meaning hope) and was once simply the women’s prison has enjoyed an incredible journey and one that John Lonergan, as prison governor since 1984, has witnessed with a certain degree of pride. He has a great knowledge of the history of the building that now houses almost one hundred women, as opposed to 500 men, it’s particularly low in Ireland relative to men, he points out.

“The new women’s prison,” says Governor Lonergan, “will be eight years in operation in September and though that is a relatively short period of time historically in a prison, it is already well established and I believe that it is a much better and more positive place.”
There’s an air of tranquillity and serenity in the Dochas Centre and ironically there is also a sense of freedom. Inmates enjoy a certain sense of liberty and live in spacious rooms with compact cleaning facilities, such as a toilet, shower and wash-hand basin. This is despite the fact that many of the females there have committed extreme crimes, some on a par with those of their male counterparts just a few feet away.

Governor Lonergan explains: “We have a pretty flexible regime. There is one house of eighteen rooms which are never locked up so the women there have complete freedom within the house all night and if they want to get up they can.

We have a second house which is open until twelve at night so they are free until midnight and the remainder are locked up at half seven. They would spend about twelve or thirteen hours in their cells from seven in the morning but that’s more to do with the house rather than them being a high security risk.

There are 500 men and just 100 women so obviously the men don’t have the facilities for communal dining.”

Each ‘house’ in the centre also includes a small kitchen and communal sitting room where the women gather to dine and relax together in contrast to their male counterparts who eat in their individual cells alone.

The Dochas Centre runs a tight ship and have in total, a staff of over a hundred, made up of prison officers, nurses, teachers, probation and welfare officers, psychologist, doctor, librarians and chaplains. A wide range of educational, work training and personal development courses and activities are available in the Centre, with teachers provided by the Dublin City V.E.C.

There has been much publicity about the fact that many of the female prisoners have been permitted to bring their newborn babies and young children into the confines of the prison and many questions have arisen as to whether this is the best environment for a child, even if they are with their biological mother.

Governor Lonergan takes this point, but stresses that, ideally, prison authorities do their best to keep children out of prison. “Our strategy over the last thirty years has been if at all possible to keep the mother and the baby out of prison and by and large that has worked– but there are always exceptions.

“We don’t have regular significant numbers of mothers and babies in prison. We try to organise it that the mother and baby are released and that is the best solution, but where a mother and baby are in prison we do try to facilitate family visits and stay-overs where women can have children for a weekend or a few days.”

As I leave the Dochas Centre, I wonder again what drove Annie to murder her husband; I wonder how she coped with life behind bars, what her daily regime was, how she coped with being separated from her loved ones and what went through her mind as she was led to the gallows on the 5th August 1928, destined to become but a statistic in years to come.
Opposite page: The women’s prison. Left: John Lonergan.