- A prison officer gossiped, watched TV, drank coffee and even lay down on a mattress and pulled “the covers over himself for five minutes” instead of keeping watch on a suicidal prisoner who hanged himself, a judge heard yesterday. Newsletter 4 April 2014.
Kieran McLaughlin is a remand prisoner in Maghaberry. His history suggests that he has been dogged for some time by mental health problems, a condition many of his friends feel may have its roots in the Northern conflict in which he was an active participant.
Late last year he was arrested and charged with killing Derry man Barry McCrory. Initially he was held on the republican wing in Maghaberry, not because the activities that led to his arrest were republican but because of his long standing association with republican activism, including two lengthy spells of imprisonment.
Seemingly, within a short period of time it became clear to his fellow prisoners that he was in need of a medical regime that the republican prisoner community in Roe House felt wholly unable to provide. His condition was impacting on both his own life and the lives of those around him, prisoners and prison staff alike. The prisoners reluctantly felt it best for him to be relocated elsewhere in the prison. He agreed to do so.
Those republican prisoners that I spoke to concluded that prison management fell far short of diligence in its management of Kieran McLaughlin’s condition. Maghaberry was hardly the exception to the rule when Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform said that prisons:
are being used as a dumping ground for people who commit offences related to their illness or disability and in place of treatment they are incarcerated in penal dustbins.
Faced with exactly this type of systemic malaise Ciara McLaughlin has spoken of her concerns for her father:
a few people have died in there and I don’t want him to be a statistic. He has mental health issues and I want them to treat him seriously.
It is not as if Maghaberry in particular has a bill of clean health in these matters. It is demonstrably a place where those with serious mental health issues have been left to their own fate, where those with a responsibility to visually monitor them lay sleeping while they hanged themselves.
In a court case earlier this year the damning allegation was made against prison officer Daniel Barclay that when the psychologically vulnerable prisoner Colin Bell was in the process of taking his own life:
… his interest in carrying out his duties are demonstrated most graphically when at 11:16, having rolled out a mattress on the floor, he turned the lights out and appeared to be watching the TV, not the CCTV and at 11:27 he can be seen to lay down on the mattress and pull the covers over himself for five minutes.
Barclay’s own culpability, about which he has expressed extreme remorse and for which he received a suspended prison sentence, is rooted in deeper management failures which arguably conditioned Barclay to carry on as was the norm. The system was asleep, not just Barclay.
In a statement, the Northern Ireland Prison Service said that it:
deeply regrets the tragic death of Mr Bell in 2008 ... It is acknowledged that he did not receive the appropriate level of care but substantial improvements have been made since that time, both in procedures and training of staff.If so why are have such improvements slipped into abeyance in the case of Kieran McLaughlin who has now threatened a hunger strike unless his medical concerns are addressed? This course of action would be rendered redundant with the application of some commons sense informed by a duty to care.
In the Irish News, RNU spokesperson Ciaran Cunningham, a friend of the ill prisoner, argued that:
Kieran McLaughlin should not be in prison. He needs to be in a hospital environment which understands that he is in an extremely distressed state and gives him the correct consideration.
Not a big ask, yet if ignored there could be bigger consequences.
No comments