McAleese praises prisoners council for 'good it has done'

IT “WOULD be impossible to ever truly or fully quantify the good that the Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas (ICPO) has done”, President Mary McAleese said yesterday. She was speaking at a conference in Dublin held to mark the council’s 25th anniversary. It was set up by Ireland’s Catholic bishops in 1985.

“I think today of Anne Maguire stepping into then prime minister Tony Blair’s office to receive a public apology for the wrong that robbed her, her husband and family of precious years of family life. It was thanks to the council’s insistent advocacy among others that the truth eventually emerged,” she said.

“What is more, the awful injustice visited upon the Maguire family, the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, which the council championed when it was singularly unpopular to do so, should teach us something about the potential for human frailty and fallibility of processes, particularly where they are under enormous pressure,” she said.

She continued that at any given time “there are probably around 1,000 Irish men and women in prisons abroad”. The council’s ethic, “that commandment to love even the most marginalised, is fundamental to the work of ICPO whose services are offered to all Irish prisoners regardless of creed or crime,” she said.

As a founder member of the council she said: “I get to attend many anniversary events as President but this is one of the few where I can say I was there when it started those 25 too short years ago.”

The Bishop of Derry and chairman of the Catholic bishops council for emigrants, Most Rev Seamus Hegarty, told the conference that “it can be a very frightening and traumatic experience having a loved one imprisoned in a foreign country”. The council “provides information to prisoners . . . It lobbies prison authorities, State officials and others, on the needs of its clients whether they are of a legal, medical, educational or practical nature,” he said.

The Bishop of Elphin and chairman of the bishops’ commission for pastoral care, Most Rev Christopher Jones, said there had to be “a better way to acknowledge and punish crime, to grant justice to victims and to create safer societies”.

The “system we have at present often contributes to an increase in crime rather than serving to reduce crime”, he said.