Carole Ann's modern urban odyssey

FROM the outside, the solid, lower middle class Forest Walk estate in Swords, Co Dublin, and the dreary Greek Street flats in the north inner city are different worlds. But Carole Ann Daly covered the distance between them in a short time.

When Carole Ann left school two years ago, her prospects appeared reasonably bright. But within two years she had developed a heroin addiction, lost her job as a legal clerk and become pregnant by her boyfriend.

The baby died at birth. Two years later she, too, was dead.

She was introduced to heroin in the social set she followed. Her boyfriend, a petty criminal from the north inner city, was a heroin addict and she simply followed his lead.

In the past two years the young couple had become more heavily involved in stealing to feed their habit.

Carole Ann was arrested near the HMV store in Grafton Street on Wednesday evening by a garda from Pearse Street station. She was well known to store guards in Grafton Street, and to gardai.

Pearse Street gardai are accustomed to arresting persistent shoplifters in Grafton Street. The experienced ones know most of the young women addicts by sight.

Addicts pass through the south city centre every day, on their way to steal in Grafton Street or to the Light House on Pearse Street for methadone treatment.

Gardai are aware that the women are stealing to feed their habits, or to pay dealers who have sold them heroin on credit. This, one garda said, is the eventual lifestyle of Dublin's young women heroin addicts.

Gardai who knew Carole Ann said yesterday that she was unlike most of the heroin addicted shoplifters they have to deal with. One said she was "pleasant" and never presented any problems for officers.

Some of the others are tough and aggressive and go shoplifting with the support of violent boy friends or relatives, in case they are grabbed by security staff.

A warrant had been issued by Dublin District Court for Carole Ann's arrest in connection with the theft of compact discs and video cassettes from HMV after she failed to turn up for a remand hearing last month. She was recognised by a garda and arrested.

The process that overtook Carole Ann on Wednesday evening is a normal part of life for most Dublin addicts.

She was held in Pearse Street station cells, which are at least new and clean, unlike at some other stations in the city. The evening shift alerted Mountjoy at around 9 p.m. and she was taken to the prison in a squad car.

On admission to the women's prison she was placed in a cubicle for searching. The search is carried out under guidelines aimed at preserving the dignity of the prisoner while ensuring that she is not carrying weapons, syringes or drugs, or showing any signs of disease or illness.

Before being taken to her cell, she was allowed a telephone call to arrange for bail the next morning.

Hundreds of women shoplifters go through the same process every year, some of them several times a month. It is a way of life for some, but it was Carole Ann's first time in the prison.

According to prison sources, the women officers were aware it was her first time in Mountjoy and were concerned that she would have difficulties as a first timer.

According to friends, Carole Ann's telephone call revealed she was anguished and desperate to get out of the jail. This is understandable.

Mountjoy is a forbidding Victorian prison and a shock for any first time visitor.

She showed no signs of distress to staff, however, and went quietly to her cell. She was not placed under special risk observation, which would have meant being inspected every 10 minutes or so.

THE prison authorities point out that they knew virtually nothing about her other than the legal reason for her detention and that she was a heroin addict, like the vast majority of the young women coming into the prison.

They did not know she had lost her baby son, a week after birth, when she was 19, or that her 24 year old boyfriend, also an addict, was serving a jail sentence for robbery in the men's prison at Mountjoy.

Although she had been an addict for at least two years, she was still not showing signs of physical degradation. She held the vestiges of her respectable background and reasonably good health.

The staff members at the women's prison are acutely attuned to their charges' problems. They are, according to one senior officer, very pro prisoner aware that most of the women passing through their hands are in prison for the pettiest of crimes, most commonly theft to support themselves, their families or their drug habit.

Only one other woman has committed suicide in prison and that death also involved drug abuse. Sharon Gregg (19), from Loughlinstown, Co Dublin, had hanged herself after she came under unbearable pressure over drugs and separation from her baby.

Although Carole Ann had been deeply attached to her boyfriend, with whom she shared a heroin addiction, friends reported that she had stopped visiting him in prison towards the end of last year.

It was not clear who had decided to end the relationship. It is accepted now that she was detached and ready to kill herself.

She was last seen by an officer who looked through the peephole of her cell door during rounds at 1 a.m. on Thursday. She was sitting on the bed reading.

The officer asked if she was all right. Carole Ann answered that she was "fine".

During the rounds 30 minutes later, the officer saw her hanging from the bars on the cell window. She had wrapped a sheet around her neck and jumped with sufficient force to break her neck.