Joy of football still apparent despite inevitably bleak setting

There are, you quickly realise after arriving, pros and, if you’ll excuse the pun, cons to playing football in a prison yard.

The nets that cover the whole area to prevent balls containing contraband being thrown in from outside mean none of the ones you are using go over the surrounding walls, which is just as well of course.

All the razor wire, on the other hand, accounts for quite a few and the evidence of prematurely ended games is everywhere around you.

This is Mountjoy's west wing on a chilly Wednesday morning and Bohemians have sent in a couple of coaches, Jeff Conway and first team player Keith Buckley, to help a team of inmates prepare for Sunday's Conway Cup match against Ballymun club Shangan/Sandyhill.

The competition may not mean that much to anyone on the outside but inside….well, you could say it’s the only game in town.

This won’t be the first staging of the event. The game is played every four months with Bohemians Under-19s alternating as the visitors. The prisoners are on bit of a run, though, they hold the trophy, having beaten Bohs 13-11 last time out and the Training Unit 8-7 since then so there is some optimism about Sunday despite the quality of the opposition (AUL Premier A) and the fact that they’ve had to do a bit of rebuilding since their last outing.

“This group has been together since July,” says the team’s manager, Johnny, an aspiring pro at one time himself who enjoyed some success as an amateur coach after returning from a spell as a youth player in England before he had, as he puts it, “a bit of bad luck”.

“We’ve lost three lads recently to the Training Unit (a first step for many towards freedom) and our goalkeeper, who was really good, just got out.”

These are, of course, occupational hazards for the player/coach of a prison team.

Obvious ability

The upside is that there is talent to work with. Tony, a right winger with obvious ability, was considered a decent prospect until he was 15 and had trials with his local League of Ireland side before drugs became something more than a distraction. “It’s really good to be playing again,” he says. “It’s something to do, something to look forward to.”

There are others playing with him in the yard who have played at a pretty respectable level but some are serving lengthy sentences for serious crimes now. It’s not just for them, though, that these games are a reminder of what might have been as Conway, a member of the family’s next generation on from the famous trio of footballing brothers Jimmy, John and Tom, says of the team he will bring in on Sunday.

His players come from communities where it is not unusual to have a neighbour away in prison and occasionally one or two meet lads they know from school or the local area when they go in for games like this weekend’s. “It’s not unusual to them,” he says, “and maybe if they weren’t playing football on the outside then that’s where they’d be themselves.”

Conway's involvement comes courtesy of Thomas Hynes, a director of Bohemians with an involvement in drug addiction counselling and work with the homeless. With the help of Conway and others as well as the support of the club, Hynes was already organising training and games for people drawn from those groups when he bumped into deputy governor Donnacha Walsh at a local charity event and Walsh asked what might be done for some of the younger Mountjoy inmates.

An initial eight week coaching course run in what was then St Patrick’s Institution went well, helping, amongst other things, to break down barriers between Dublin and country prisoners and the work continues to bring tangible rewards with what is now an older group of “enhanced” status prisoners.

"Without a doubt it makes our job easier," says Jim Kenneally a prison officer with particular responsibility for helping inmates to maintain their physical fitness. "From their point of view, there's a feel good factor when the endorphins are flowing and from ours, I think it's a sign of the prison service becoming more professional."

The boxes

Aside from the bags of toiletries that they get by way of prizes, involvement in the football can help prisoners tick some of the boxes required to complete the President's Gaisce programme. Lorraine Bannon is one of the officers who oversees that work which has produced more than 20 bronze and four silver award winners in recent years.

Some tailoring of the programme has to be done but Bannon says the broadening range of activities have improved the relationship between prison officer and prisoner.

“It was more officer versus prisoner, now there’s more communication,” she says.

Walsh welcomes that and the effect that the football, in particular, has had amongst the prisoners themselves.

“What we’ve seen is that football can break down barriers between the different groups.”

So far, the work done has been with those for whom segregation is less of an issue but given the success to date he hopes the programme might be extended in a structured and supported way to those in more tightly controlled areas of the prison in the future.

Conway is certainly optimistic. “There’s discipline and respect there between fellas who are playing football. You get a couple of guys squaring up to each other now and then but that’s pretty normal in any game of football,” he says.

“Even when we mixed, there were a few hefty tackles alright,” he continues with a laugh that gets you wondering slightly, “but that goes on in my own team as well.”

Something good

Beside him, Buckley is obviously enthusiastic about the whole project.

“It’s great,” he says. “You’re a bit wary at first but they make you welcome, like they’re your own. People think they’re going to boot the legs off you but nothing like that ever happens, nothing at all. If one of them does start getting rough they’d be telling them to stop because they know that we’re there to try and do something good.”

Certainly, the 10 lads chosen as the squad for Sunday’s six-a-side game, look to be revelling in the training session that follows. The venue is very basic, the setting inevitably bleak but it doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

The balls are an issue, though. Occasionally they run out because of the razor wire but Walsh proudly demonstrates the slightly upgraded model purchased for the game which he hopes might survive just a little better.

He is looking to the long-term. “We hope that football can help them when they go back out. The days of lads leaving prison with all their belongings in a bag and with nowhere to go may be gone but some of these lads would not be going out to jobs of further education. Football is one of the things that can give them a focus; training twice a week and a game on Sunday.”

The lads, no doubt, like the idea and Johnny, for one, certainly sees the game as having a major role to play in his life back outside.

Just now, though, there are more immediate priorities. This Sunday, he and his lads have a match to win and come 2.45 the west wing will be out in numbers to cheer them on.