A GROUP of men were fired on as they broke into the State’s largest prison complex earlier this week.
They managed to throw five mobile phones over a wall into an inmates’ exercise yard before a soldier saw them and fired a shot.
The security breach at the Portlaoise and Midlands prisons campus was the latest in a series of efforts to throw mobiles over the perimeter walls by people who had cut their way through an external security fence that surrounds the campus.
A soldier who was on sentry duty on Thursday night at Portlaoise Prison, which is under Army guard because it houses the State’s most serious criminals, saw two men who had broken through the wire fence at about 7pm.
The men then ran towards the Midlands Prison perimeter wall and started to throw phones over the wall into the exercise yard.
The soldier shouted at the men to identify themselves. When they did not follow his instructions, he fired a single round of 5.56mm ammunition as a warning shot. The men ran back towards the hole in the fence and fled on foot.
A prison officer retrieved five phones from the exercise yard. It is not believed any other phones got into the possession of any of the inmates. Gardaí were alerted and set up checkpoints on the roads leading from the area.
Initial reports suggested three men had been identified as suspects, but were not arrested for lack of evidence. However, Garda sources said this was not true.
“A large number of motorists were stopped and spoken to by gardaí, not just three people,” said one source.
The same source said it was not clear who the two men were who managed to throw the phones over the prison wall.
It was also unclear for whom the phones were intended inside the prison.
The Midlands Prison houses some of the Republic’s most violent gangland criminals.
Many of them have been transferred there to prevent them from clashing with members of rival gangs in other jails.
The fence around the jail has been cut a number of times in recent weeks as part of efforts to smuggle phones in.
Prison staff believe gang members have resorted to higher-risk methods to get mobiles into the prison since new security measures, including searching cells and visitors, were introduced to stop the flow of drugs and phones to inmates.