Prison officers seek help on gangs problem

PRISON OFFICERS are calling on Minister for Justice Alan Shatter to urgently review the growing power of gangs in prisons.

The Prison Officers Association says violent and powerful prison gangs are terrorising more compliant or weaker prisoners and prison officers have no clear instructions on how to handle the issue.

Union president Stephen Delaney said it was well known that the prison gang problem in the Republic had become a serious issue in recent years.

“Prison gangs are active, vicious and cause immense difficulty within our prisons,” he said last night at the opening of his association’s annual conference in Galway.

“We have heard some evidence of how these gangs operate on the outside in our courts in recent weeks. This is an unsafe situation which can have dreadful consequences.”

While Mr Delaney said he could not identify the gang he was referring to, he is believed to have been referring to members of Limerick’s McCarthy-Dundon gang, members of which were jailed last week for issuing threats to kill members of another family.

Prison sources said gangs such as the McCarthy-Dundons were so feared in jails that they bullied other inmates into carrying out their orders.

They also threatened to harm other prisoners’ relatives on the outside if those prisoners did not hide drugs, weapons and mobile phones in their own cells on behalf of the gang members.

The gang situation has become so problematic that different factions have to be housed in separate wings of prisons – a very significant logistical challenge in overcrowded prisons.

In some facilities, such as Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, one in five prisoners is locked into cells for up to 21 hours a day as a protection against prison gangs who have issued threats against them.

Mr Delaney said many prisoners lived in real fear of the gangs, who had established a rule of fear through intimidation, threats and violence that mirrored how they worked outside the prison setting.

He believed the Irish Prison Service “seems to largely ignore” the growing concerns around the power of the prison gangs.

“It is left pretty much to the individual [prison] officer to work it out on a day-by-day, issue-by-issue basis. This is unfair and unsafe.”

The union’s three-day annual conference continues today in Galway.