Blogs

Listen to John Lonergan's talk and reading.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode John Lonergan. former Governor of Mountjoy Prison, talks of his time in the Prison Service and his philosophy on prison, dealing with prisoners and people in general. He touches on parenting, the importance of education, self-esteem and community. Recorded in front of a live audience at the Central Library in September 2011 as part of its 'Crime and the City' series.Thanks very much for the invitation because it’s great to the opportunity just to share a few I suppose experiences with people and then hopefully later on we’ll have some dialogue and some debate or some discussion because it’s a subject that everybody has an opinion on.  Probably one of the subjects…there was an old man that used to work years and years ago in Mountjoy and he said it’s a the one subject that everybody has an opinion on and the further you’re removed from the field of a prison the more stronger your opinions are which is actually true and that’s not a criticism that’s just because of I suppose the lack of insight and information into it.  As it’s been said I have been involved in the system for 42 years plus, starting off in Limerick in 1968, and I’ve often said reminiscing, looking back 42 years ago, a different world, a different prison system, a different society – everything was different.  Indeed I’ve a friend who says that we, us, people, our generation who were born in the late 40s and early 50s probably lived through the greatest changing society and culture of any other generation ever past and he claims ever future as well.  And I wouldn’t disagree with him because we lived through phenomenal change and just looking at the prison services, an isolated issue, and crime we had around 660 people in prison in total in Ireland in those days 260 of them were juveniles or under age 16-21 year olds so we only had 400 adults in three prisons, in Limerick – a small little local prison, Portlaoise – where all the convicts were, that was a substitute for transportation penal servitude, they were known as convicts.  Prior to 1856 of course we got rid of all our problems to other countries and then after 1856/57, that period, transportation from Ireland ended and we substituted transportation with a penalty called penal servitude.  It’s gone now off the legislation completely.  I don’t think there’s any sentences left of penal servitude but the idea of penal servitude was that it was a complete substitute for transportation.  And the difference between it and imprisonment was that it was a sentence that at one stage was handed down, the time of the warrant ran irrespective of whether you were in custody or not, so if you could escape and stay out for 4 or 5 years the time actually was still being served because the idea was well sure if you were transported well you couldn’t escape as such.  That was the idea.But anyway that’s gone now and now we have imprisonment almost for every crime but anyway that was to just put it into perspective I suppose and like everybody else, anybody here as well that wouldn’t have any insight into the system, I’m sure you would be thinking the very same as I was thinking way back in 1968 that all the baddies were in prison, all the goodies were outside and that was it.  And off I went with that sort of an expectation and it was proved to be fatal because almost instantly I discovered that the reality was a million miles away from what I expected and I’m sure what you expect as well because I often compared it afterwards as the equivalent of a county home.  The young people here won’t understand what I’m saying when I’m saying a county home but when I was a child growing up every county had a hospital where all the poor ‘oul social misfits and all the broken people and all the poor people ended up.  My mother used to say, you know, I’ll end up in the county home as a result of us, like the children she had, (laughter) or she’d be better off in the county home was another saying she used to have (laughter) and probably she probably would be, she’d probably have more peace of mind there and less responsibility.  But anyway older people will know if they ever visited them they’d know, you know, they were very depressing places because you had a lot of broken people and disconnected people and sad people there and I thought after a while I often equated the prison that I entered into in 1968 as the equivalent of the county home.  A couple of high profile tough type of criminals but the majority were people who were out of psychiatric hospitals, were winos – at that time we used to call them winos, they were drinking old cheap wine and living like that on the streets.  Anyway that was the way it was.  There was only 400 adults plus in it and just think today that we’re well over 4,500 without temporary release it would be over 5,000 and the graph is flying up.  So you’d have to asking yourself what the hell has gone wrong even though we have made so much progress.  My friend says we had the biggest change ever in our generation, that’s a span of about 50 years, when you go back, if you could go back, anyone that’s old enough to go back, you couldn’t disagree with it.  Phenomenal change in terms of technology.  Remember, we only had a radio at that time, we hadn’t televisions and just imagine what has happened since with technology.  Like on Saturday morning, just unbelievable, you’ll be sitting down in your home if you’re interested at 9.30 and you can actually tune in to Ireland playing Australia in New Zealand, live as it happens.  Now if I told my grandparents that, that had happened, they’d say ‘you’re cracked’ or they just say ‘we now know it for certain you’re gone mad’.  But anyway that will just tell you, and travel is fantastic, it took people months to go to America now they can go in a few hours.  And so the world became smaller and more information and better education, believe it or not, even though we’ll touch on the education later on but generally speaking far greater education in terms of its availability and more and more people availing of it and a whole lot of different things as well.  And I suppose that’s why I’d be saying to you, especially again the younger people, when we are in a bad recession at the moment and we are but it’s relative, it’s relative to what we were used to in the last 10 or 15 years rather than saying we have a recession now that it was the equivalent of the 60s or 40s, there’s not a comparison, the people in the 40s and 50s and go back another 100 years to the famine and then you really had recession and that’s not living in the past it’s just putting it all into perspective.  So today while we have a recession and all that things have changed and I suppose that’s interesting in terms of society and the way I suppose it’s been structured as well.  We blame the British as you know, when we were growing up the British were blamed for the way our society was structured and then, you know, now we have had our own responsibility for it for many, many years and have we done any better in terms of a fair and equal society?  I’d say not, I’d say we actually made it worse in terms of the gap because when I was a child the landlord was regarded as somebody that was imposed on and the big land owners and all those sort of people, well now we have segregation worse than ever in terms of how ... and this is leading to crime because a lot of crime is still ... we’ll concentrate mainly in Dublin city but statistically we’re very weak as well in terms of research would you believe it, there’s very little research being done around monitoring crime and doing sort of social and criminology type of connection with crime or where it comes and all.  The last piece of decent work that was done was done in 1996 in Mountjoy by Dr Paul O’Mahony and I tried to get it repeated in 2006 which would have given us a 20 year span and three comparisons to do which would have been very informative and I couldn’t get them to do it, I couldn’t get the Department of Justice to give the money to do it and it was an opportunity missed.  But in 1996/97 when it was done the last time, for instance, six little pockets in Dublin supply 75% of all Dublin born prisoners.  I’ll just repeat that for you because people won’t often believe it.  75% of people came from six separate little areas, tiny little areas by the way not huge big areas, tiny little areas within six separate postal districts, 75% of all people in Mountjoy in 1996 came from those addresses so we could identify very clearly where these black spots, if you like to call them in terms of crime now, where they were located.  And the numbers were very small, the numbers are still very small in terms of the numbers of people who go to prison, very, very small, around 5,000 as I said, 5,000 two or three hundred in total, including temporary release, so when you take that out of a population of 5 million, you know, we’re still a very small system and it still gives us a great opportunity I suppose.  There’s a lot of women here as well, just to break it down for women and men as well, the world over this is true, something that you mightn’t have thought about, but the percentage of men versus women in prison is huge, the difference, about 96/97% of the prison population are men or males and about 3/4% are women and that’s by the way generally the world over.  So that’s another issue, why is it that there’s so many men?  Is it because of their masculinity and their aggression and all that or is it a culture or what the heck is it?  But certainly that’s another breakdown so you don’t have a huge concentration of people.  And by the way it’s not limited to Dublin it applies in any city in the world, the same old issues apply, poor areas so housing, I just want to leave this with you, that housing policy is at the core of a lot of it.  Not everything, because there are people up in Mountjoy that were living in very different circumstances, but 75% were born into areas where there was huge what I would call social disadvantage in terms of amenities and facilities and culture.  For me the biggest single factor I suppose and I’ve been arguing this for years and years and years is the culture you’re born into.  I just think that that is far more significant than most of realise unless we sort of reflect on it, the culture, the culture you’re grown in.  If you’re born in a city, for instance, you inherit quite a sort of an urbanised type of culture.  If you’re born in the country it’s completely the opposite, you have a very rural culture.  And then so on, and within Dublin itself there’s different cultures in different areas.  In affluent areas the culture is all about getting on well, going to third level education, getting high qualifications, getting big money and living a high lifestyle.  My daughter one time said to me “But dad there’s difficulties in affluent areas as well” and she was pointing out some of them, she said “For instance, there’s many of them have eating disorders because they want to stay nice and slim so they can fit the profile, the expectation”.  Money, they get disillusioned when they’re not getting 50K to start off in a job because their expectations are so high.  So it’s not that affluent areas don’t have their difficulties, they do, but I suppose the contrast is amazing, the difference, the ambition of people.  You know, one person’s ambition is to become the Chief Justice, another person’s ambition is simply to be able to get a job in the local shop and to get the job in the local shop would be a massive achievement and I suppose that’s the difference in expectation and in terms of education because I think it’s very important just to mention some of the other things that can be tackled should be tackled.  Education, for instance, about 50% of all prisoners in the middle 2000s, about 6 or 7 years ago when the survey was done nationally, 50% were in level one or pre-level one in terms of literacy and numeracy.  In other words 50% on average of all prisoners from 16 years upwards either were in pre-level one which was lower than the normal measurement that’s done for numeracy and literacy in ordinary life, they had to introduce a pre-level one because so many were so low and level one is very basic, you can barely read and write now, I’m talking about barely.  You could read maybe the main headlines on a paper and it would be very basic stuff.  So 50% of people were in that and only 6% in 1997 of all prisoners in Mountjoy stayed on at school after 16 years of age.  And 57% were gone out of education before 15.  So there’s a clear link, if you leave school early it doesn’t mean you’re going to end up in Mountjoy because that would be very unfair to thousands of people who left school at 15.  The majority of people who leave school don’t end up in prison but it is an early indicator, leaving education at a very young age is an indicator.  I would be putting a red flag up in areas where they’ve high levels of early school leavers simply saying that we need to watch out for those areas because there’s certainly the signs of ... so education is at the very core of it.Unemployment, about 88% of people in prison are unemployed before they came into prison.  That’s massive.  So you’ve poor education and then you have poor employment skills or poor employment experience so you’re at a massive disadvantage as well as the whole culture which is negative.  What does negative culture do?  Negative culture really says that if you get up in the morning to go to school or go to work a lot of people, your peers, a lot of your neighbours, would say  ‘what the hell are you doing?  Stay in bed’ or ‘Who do you think you are?’ or if you go back to second level education to try to reinvent yourself the pressure will be ‘Who the hell do you think you are?  You’re getting too big for yourself Miss’ because what they know is that once you get educated and get informed what do you do?  You change your lifestyle and people don’t want you to do that so instead of encouraging you they actually drag you back down again, the culture does.  So that’s the sort of basics of it and then I suppose I said I’d mention drugs because very closely associated with drugs is criminality and criminality is so much associated with drugs.  Now which comes first I don’t know, I want to be honest, I don’t know.  Does criminality come first or does drugs come first?  In my view I’d say it is a bit of an overlap.  And in drugs I also include alcohol by the way because alcohol is still a massive contributor to all sorts of difficulties in terms of violence and aggression in particular.  So addiction is a massive contributing factor and where it comes from.  In many areas it is a contributor, it shows us its ugly head because it relieves people from the pain they’re in, in the lifestyles that they set, because that’s what drugs does.  Or at least they sell you that.  Anyone that knows anything about addiction and drugs will know that the old smiley face on the old ecstasy tablet isn’t there for fun.  The idea of putting the happy face on that tablet is to say if you take me I’ll make you happy and of course he will for a couple of seconds or a half an hour or 2 hours and then of course it wears off and you were never as bad in terms of your mental and physical and emotional wellbeing.  You’re sick and you want more and more and more.  And I did say and I do say yet I never came across what I would call a happy contented drug addicted person yet.  (laughter)  No, because if they’re high on drugs they’re out of this world anyway and they don’t know where they are or they don’t care so they’re in a false world even though they feel in some way cut off from the mainstream but they’re in a false world or they’re not connected to the reality.  And when they haven’t drugs they’re sick and they’re longing for drugs and they’re aggressive and they’re depressed so ... and there’s no in between, that’s the way it is.  So they’re all the time looking for something, to get drugs, and when they get the drugs they’re all the time stoned out of their mind.  So anybody that tries to sell me the idea that drugs are brilliant and they do great ... I’m talking about like heroin and cocaine and heavy drugs.  And naturally enough they’re ... and people from the inner city here will know that way back in the late 70s heroin showed us its ugly head for the first time in the inner city part of Dublin in the poorest and most socially disadvantaged areas and I often ask the question why is it that in every city in the world the place where drugs are most prominent, certainly the history of them was in the most disadvantaged areas.  Were they because people were very, very vulnerable or were they exploitable or whatever?  But that’s what happened.  And by the way Irish society and Dublin society ignored it until it became a crisis out on the main streets but while they were in their own little areas nobody took any great notice.  And the people like the late Tony Gregory gave a lifetime raising that and challenging saying ‘Why the hell are you allowing this to happen in our little localities when in actual fact ....’ and it was only actually when it began to spread.Then of course with the Celtic Tiger era and will all the money drugs became far more widespread in every community and every social class.  And so the yuppies who had plenty of money and high profile lifestyles they used things like cocaine on the weekends to give them that little extra buzz and to give them greater energy.  So instead of money reducing the demand on drugs it actually increased the usage of drugs right across the social levels and right from urban Ireland to rural Ireland as well by the way.  It’s not just Dublin, everywhere in Ireland today they have a drug problem, believe it or not, in the smallest little village they have a drug problem.  There’s drugs seeping into those little localities and a lot of people are using them.  So that gives you sort of a history too.  So drugs are a huge contributing factor and then of course nowadays we have the consequences in the drug areas where you have the gangs, because most of the gangs are directly associated with drugs, for two reasons, either controlling the areas in terms of the industry that drug sees, a massive industry in terms of making money.  Controlling patches or else people that owe money.  We could talk a lot about drugs, we won’t talk too much about it except people get interested later on, but I mean it is itself it’s a subject that needs an awful lot of teasing out and discussion because the dynamics are unbelievable in terms of what happens to people and how people become totally and utterly dependent on drugs and then become totally vulnerable in terms of being used to sell drugs, to supply drugs, to hold onto drugs or whatever.  Once you get compromised well you’re vulnerable and if you’re compromised you will be used and the one thing you can’t do is go to the police in case anyone might say ‘well why don’t they go to the guards’, well in that culture the worst crime you can commit is giving information to the guards would you believe.  That’s the worst crime.  It’s actually more acceptable to kill somebody than it is to give information.  And that is an amazing ... but it’s a true statement.  So the last thing you can do is go to the police even though ... and this has nothing in the world got to do with criticism of the police, it’s nothing got to do with the police in that sense, but it’s just a culture, you don’t give information.  So if you don’t give information how do you protect yourself?  Well you don’t protect yourself you’re just vulnerable. So you can imagine, now of course I keep saying these are the sort of challenges, you can imagine what it’s like for little children to be born into those areas.  I always start at that position and say look this is where it starts, little children born into this culture, growing up in this environment, how the hell do we expect them to turn out anyway different than what they do?  Sure the culture is so powerful and the influence are so powerful that it’s so, so difficult and the miracle I suppose is and this needs to be recorded today as well, for me to say it, is that families and individual parents often but families often survive that believe it or not and come out at the other end and never get into difficulty.  And they’re the real heroes.  Imagine the struggle for a mother in some of those areas, every day trying to ... and I particularly mention mothers because they genuinely and normally look after children in that sense.  Imagine trying to mind children in that environment and bring them through?  And in some cases they have brought them through and brought them out at the other end which is almost a miracle and deserves great credit for endurance and commitment and stability and all that.I suppose I should mention as well about our own makeup because we’re very good sometimes, I think anyway, at looking at other people and sort of pointing the finger and saying ‘Look at me’, even fellas often say to me ‘Look I was born poor and I didn’t rob’ and I always say to them “Jesus you were great (laughter) we’ll put a statue up for you” (laughter) because listen when I mention disadvantaged areas some people who live in those areas sort of take it almost that it is offensive, I don’t mean any offence to people at all, but what I’m saying is that the environment and the infrastructure and the amenities are absolutely almost non-existent.  And you go to other parts of Dublin city and you see the amenities that are there, swimming pools, playing pitches, second level colleges, third level colleges, housing –wonderful housing estates – I’d say how the hell do we expect children born in some of the more socially disadvantages areas to compete with children at that level?  And I’m afraid money as well, I’m afraid I have to say that money is also a major contributing factor and a major influence.  If you have money ... I know myself because my daughters are grown up and they’re adults now in their 30s but when they growing up as teenagers especially at second level, you know, and every parent that’s here knows this that if you wanted them to develop to their potential going back to if it was music or art or sport or whatever it all costs money, it costs us a lot of money.  And in things like music and talents like that if you hadn’t the resources I’m afraid a lot of the talent would lay dormant and would never be produced and I suppose that was one of the frustrations that I found in Mountjoy and often spoke about that, the talent that was up in Mountjoy, there is wonderful talent there.  So you should never associate criminality with a lack of talent or people who are in prison or in poor areas with a lack of ability or talent, it’s the lack of opportunity that is the key factor not the talent.  And one of the saddest things of all would be and one of the most I suppose inspiring things and gratifying things of all would be for somebody, a teacher or a social worker or a chaplain or somebody, a member of staff, to meet somebody in a prison, discover what that talent is, help that person to access to something that will enable him or her to develop that talent and change their lives.  And that happens often.  Change their lives, simply because now that they became aware of their talent and now because they got the opportunity to develop the talent it changed their attitudes, their self esteem and their ability to move away.What’s the biggest factor I’d say in prison?  I’d say the biggest factor in prison would be low self-esteem.  If you said to me what is the biggest single factor that you’ll find right across almost the entire prison population?  I’d say low self-esteem.  Very little confidence.  Very little belief in themselves and very little sort of drive and energy and I suppose commitment to be able to make that transition.  It is alright talking about it, it is easy to tell people what to do, but to get them to be able to sustain it in terms of the discipline that’s required and the commitment and I’m afraid opportunity as well.  I keep saying always I mean in my life and in everyone else’s life, every single person here, young and old, it doesn’t matter what age you are, what country you come from, it doesn’t matter one thing, the one thing I’m certain of that every human being is totally dependent in their lives to other people.  There’s not a person I ever met anywhere in the world that was able to stand up and say ‘Well from day one I made it on my own’, there’s nobody.  And so we are all dependent on others, our parents, our neighbours, our teachers, our employers, our friends, our wives or husbands later on and a whole multitude and life’s doors of opportunity often open by chance rather than by design and everybody here has experienced that.  The day you’re somewhere by pure chance.  I remember Brian Farrell, Professor Brian Farrell who was on Prime Time and Seven Days on RTÉ for many, many years and became very famous as a broadcaster but he was born in England.  And I remember him when he retired being interviewed and they said how did you come, where you became, and he said “Listen every single change in my life happened by pure chance.”  He was born in England by chance.  He came back to Ireland by chance.  He went to UCD by chance.  When he was in UCD as a part-time student he met somebody who said “Listen would you not be interested in broadcasting?” and “Here’s someone you should write to” and he did and they gave him a little bit of a start and then all ... and so life is very much like that I would say.  And the same is true the other way round, that circumstances can often dictate, and that’s not an excuse by the way in case anyone might be say you’re only making excuses for people.  I’m not making excuses though but what I’m saying is the reality can be that chance and opportunity is twofold and in some cases doors open for people and in other cases they don’t. Just prison then for a few minutes because people know nothing about it, thank God.  99% of people know nothing about prison, thank God.  I always say to parents in particular when I’m talking to parents one of the toughest jobs and challenges any parent will ever get in their life is having to go to a prison to visit a son or a daughter and the more you’re removed from that environment over the years, if you have never been to a prison, if you have never been in a court, if you have never any connection, the worse it is.  The most traumatic.  And I often give the example about how the culture that’s created, if I go sometimes to ... I talk a bit in schools, if I got to a middle class school or a working class school or in certain areas in Dublin sometimes the teacher will say to me going in ‘by the way there’s a girl in there or a boy in there whose father is in prison, just that you know’ and of course naturally I will never mention anything about such things in talking to kids in a classroom and they would most definitely not say anything.  So I go through the little session and they’d leave and that was the end of it.  But when I got to certain areas of this city, I’m not going to mention any of them now because I regard them as absolutely vital areas, they’re great areas and there’s some wonderful people there, but when I go into the secondary school in some of those areas I’m not inside the door in the classroom when there’s five or six young lads up around me saying “Do you know me dad?  Do you know me ...?” (laughter) and while that’s funny, and you know it is funny, it’s also very sad because what it tells you is that in my culture going up to Mountjoy is normal.  And I often say that so many times, you take no notice of this but if you go up to Mountjoy and stand on the North Circular Road today at 2 o’clock I guarantee you you’ll see many little babies being brought up in the arms or in a buggy and up and in through the gate and into the visiting area in Mountjoy and then they’ll be subjected to a dog sniffing at them and a search, including a body search where their mums might be asked to take off their nappies even, and they’re brought in through all this system into prison to meet dad who is not now allowed even to hold a baby so ... and this is all done in the name of humanity and justice and all that sort of stuff.  And imagine you’re doing that from the age of 4 or 5 weeks or days.  Because I met a baby going in one day that was only 3 days old.  So if you’re doing that for 5 or 6 years can you imagine what fear prison has for you?  None.  None.  Sure this is where I go on my outing every day.  And they’re the human challenges.  That’s nothing got to do by the way with making excuses for the adults who get into crime, that’s a separate issue, they must be dealt with separately and the penalties must be separate.  But the dilemma is how do you compensate for the child?  And how do you try to keep that relationship going in a very difficult environment.So prison, for me anyway, is the worst thing that can happen to you after health.  If I had a choice tomorrow morning, I often say this, if someone gave me a choice tomorrow morning a very serious illness, for instance like cancer, and treatment in the Mater Hospital, or 5 years in Mountjoy. I’d opt for 5 years in Mountjoy, honestly I would.  Why?  Because I’d say I’ll come out of Mountjoy.  I’ll survive it and I have my health and in 5 years time I’ll be back again on my feet.  I mightn’t survive the Mater Hospital and serious cancer or any other serious health disease.  So I’m just saying you have to put into perspective.  That would be my perspective, health first, I’d hold onto my health first, and after that I’d say the worst experience for any human being is to be sent to prison.  So any idea that people have that this is some sort of an old holiday resort or some sort of a good time, and just because fellas come out of prison and say ‘Ah Jesus it was grand’ you see that’s a reflection on their standards, their ambitions, where they’re at.  Anyone who says to me well they’re better off in prison that they are outside, I say well that’s a sadder reflection of what’s outside than what’s inside because I can assure you that inside is horrible.  Even in the most modern prisons it’s still terrible but in the older prisons like Mountjoy it’s horrific.  And that’s it, that’s honest, it’s horrific.  And it was bad enough when I started off in Mountjoy which as Padraic mentioned I started off there in 1984 and I spent over 20 years there despite the fact that I spent a few years in Portlaoise.  But at least when I started off there was about 420 on a daily average and would you believe that in 1985 and 86 I was writing to the Department of Justice giving out about the numbers.  Honest to God, at 425, this is grossly overcrowded and something has to be done, 1985.  And then I ended up with 880 then – 880 – double the population and I was still writing, this is a scandal.So I suppose in some ways, this is the amazing thing, things changed in my time in prison, some things changed brilliantly I have to say, I’m delighted to say it, some things improved dramatically and other things never changed and other things deteriorated.  What are the things that deteriorated more?  And Liam Herrick is here from the Irish Penal Reform Trust and he has been advocating and arguing in public streets on this issue for a long time now, but the worst issue that has happened is overcrowding in terms of doubling up.  And most people here have no idea about what the consequences of doubling up are and you hear people like me and Liam and others talking about doubling up and you say ah it’s too good for them, ah what the hell do they expect, like a former Minister said, after all he said they’re prisoners, the cheek of you.  If we don’t have some basic measurement, some basic standards even for prisoners I would say well then we’ve lost it, we must have basic standards.  But anyway just to say in terms of doubling up, I guess none of you have ever thought about this I could absolutely be certain of this every single person here young and old needs time on their own.  I bet you do.  I bet you every day you spend some amount of time exclusively on your own.  It might be in the kitchen, it might be in your bedroom, it might be out in the garden, I don’t care where it is (laughter) but I’ll guarantee you you’re somewhere every day on your own.  And our mother used to say, “Get out, I want a bit of peace” and we’d be all ran out into the garden or out to the field and she’d be pottering around the house but she needed space.  Every single human being needs space on their own, to get the hell out of ... and if you’re in the prison and you’re doubled up in prison you’ll never spend a second on your own.  Isn’t that terrible?  Or unbelievable rather than maybe terrible because some people might say it was too good for them.  But being on your own, you’re never, you’ll spend about 16 hours a day locked up in the cell and you’ve someone with you and maybe two or three people with you.  And maybe a header with you, a guy that’s quite crazy.  (laughter)  Seriously - quite crazy.  Imagine sharing your cell with somebody that never stops talking.  (laughter) Just think about that.  10 o’clock at night and he’s (makes a noise) and you’re trying to sleep.  Or you’re in a cell with someone who is bullying you, a big strong fella and he’s telling you, shush, give me all your cigarettes, give me all your – whatever it is you have – chocolate, give me everything you have.  But do you know what I said about giving information?  You can’t give information? Why can’t you give information?  Because now you are absolutely totally persona non grata, you’re not accepted at all, so you have to try and put up with it.  But the biggest single thing, suppose you’re sharing with someone and they’re snoring all night.  I’m talking about 5 or 6 or 7 years of this now, this isn’t just something that will just go away.  So doubling up anyway has been an absolute disaster and would you believe that the old Brits in the middle 1900s brought in a piece of legislation that said every prisoner should be in a single cell and those who need communal sort of cells because some people who were psychiatrically ill might need somebody they had to be three, in what were called triple cells.  So the cells were huge and there was three beds in them and they were ... and if you put ... in my day when I was a young lad down in Limerick if I put two prisoners into a cell and shut the door I’d be sacked, it was that serious.  You never put two prisoners in a cell.  You always put one or three.  The three idea was that they’ll protect each other, there’d be no abuse and no bullying, the chances would be that one would protect the other or that sort of stuff.  Keep an eye out for them.  So they spend about ... so doubling up is the worst thing. Drugs, the greatest scourge that ever happened Ireland I think.  I’m always saying I’ve been convinced that anything else that happened, even the bloody recession, I’d say no I’d say drugs when you think about it in the last 30 years or so, what the damage they have done and the devastation they have brought to people, the human suffering, not just to individual people who are addicted but to everybody in their family and to everybody often in their community as well.  So it’s not confined to just the person who is addicted, can you imagine what it’s like to have a young person addicted to heroin, for instance, every time they leave the door if you’re their parent, for instance, or brother or sister, what are you?  You’re terrified.  He’ll be caught, he’ll be arrested, he’ll be shot, he’ll come home stoned, he’ll die of an overdose or whatever.  And the consequence of what drugs have done are huge I’d say and I’m not so sure what sort of a handle we have on it yet in terms of that. The other good things that happened in prison I suppose is education, why in some prisons it’s far better than others, because of facilities by the way rather than because of lack of teaching.  That’s the one thing I could never say in Mountjoy there was never any difficulty with teachers, we got as many teachers as we could accommodate.  Our problem in Mountjoy was we couldn’t accommodate, only facilities for about 40 prisoners or 45 at any one time out of 600 or 700.  So that puts it into perspective.  But it wasn’t because we couldn’t get the teachers it was simply because we couldn’t facilitate.  But the work they do is immense considering the limitations on their resource because education must be at the very foundation of solutions, I think.  That if you don’t educate ... because it’s not just simply about work by the way, because we think sometimes that it’s just about work, but education is so important right across life’s spectrum, it’s not just work.  Imagine if you illiterate or you’re only at 50% and your little child is going to school and the little child comes home with his little first year book, you can’t read it, imagine that?  You just can’t sit down with your own little child and read and that’s not confined to prisoners, but I’m talking about prisoners rather than the broader thrust of society.  So education is vital in terms of knowledge, access, ability, confidence – so there’s a million and one benefits come out of education including an extra to just getting jobs.  And by the way as well one of the lowest motivated people are ... and this is true in life as well as in prison, the lowest motivated people in prison in relation to education are those who have the lowest levels of education, it is.  People who go into prison who have no education or poorly educated are the very ones that have no motivation and vice and versa, if you go into prison and you have already a degree and you’re going to spend 5 years in prison what do you do?  Well I’d be doing a degree that I’d loved to have done, whatever a degree, I’ll learn Spanish and do a degree in Social Science or something, and you would, and you’d get it.  Why?  Because you have the ability, the motivation and you’d say well now while I’m in prison I must ... I know a neighbour of mine ended up in prison a few years ago, 4 or 5 years ago, I knew him very well.  He ended up in prison.  And he was very high profile in terms of job; he had a very powerful job, very well educated.  What did he do when he was in prison?  He did a degree in Spanish and he got his degree in Spanish.  And why?  Because he said listen while I’m here I might as well do something and he came out of prison and he had a degree and he’s able to speak fluent Spanish.  I’m just making that point, that if he went into prison illiterate I’d say you can almost guarantee he’d come out ... so some of the jobs or challenges around motivating people.  The same with addiction would you believe.  Because everybody says why don’t you treat them as if was a simple little problem or a simple task of just walking around giving everyone an injection or something and saying now that will ... of course the biggest problem with addiction is, you know, accepting that you’re addicted, recognising that you’re addicted and motivating yourself to do something about your addiction and that’s where prison found it very difficult and is still finding it very difficult because quite a huge, biggest percentage of people who are addicted their first stage is total denial.  You meet them, you talk to them, you say listen you’ll have difficulty with your addiction, what, I’ve no addiction, I can give it up anytime I like, I only take it when I’m outside.  Of course they are addicted but they’re in denial and it is no use I telling you that you’ve a problem.  That’s useless.  The only stage of recovery is when you tell me you’ve a problem.  I’ve a problem can you help me and of course then ... now the struggle in prison is that when a person comes to that decision the help isn’t always available for them and therefore another opportunity is lost because in Mountjoy alone if you were to respond to the needs of everybody there about 500 I’d say of the 700 have a history of addiction at some level or other.  Some would be very serious.  You can imagine the facilities that would be required to respond to that number of people who would be at all different levels.  But 250 or 260 in my time in Mountjoy were on methadone on a daily basis.  250 on a daily basis getting methadone as a substitute for heroin so that was massive. And of course the last disaster in Mountjoy would have been that they hadn’t and had not up to and probably won’t have for a while to come yet, internal sanitation.  So they still have pots.  They’re still slopping out.  There’s still all that humiliation of people.  A lack of washing facilities and cleaning facilities and hygiene very low because of the old building.  Mountjoy by the way was built in 1850, opened on the 8th of March 1850, which is 161 years ago since last March.  And is probably one of if not the only institution in Dublin that’s still operating to full capacity and the same basis as they did in 1850 which is amazing.  Because the main block in Mountjoy is exactly the same today as it was way back in 1850.  So the facilities are very ... so, for instance, there was no education facilities built into Mountjoy, there was no work facilities would you believe, because they all stayed in their cells apparently, 22 or 23 hours a day in those days.  They did work in their cells so they seldom came out of their cells.  Even at mass on a Sunday they were in cubicles so they never met, so each person sat into a cubicle so as that they couldn’t speak or see each other.  So prison was designed in 1850 for separation and segregation and all that sort of stuff.  The idea ... Crofton was a very famous ‘prison reformer’ and his policy was that you’d sort of beat the bad out of them first, you know, and you’d punish the bad out of them and then when all their badness is going, it’s something like our education when we were kids (laughter), seriously, that was very much the policy of our education system.  We were beaten when we did things wrong, physically beaten, and we were beaten when we didn’t do things right, like with spellings for instance.  So their philosophy was the same, that you beat the bad out of them.  I would obviously argue totally against that and say that I’m totally opposed to the concept that punishment works in that sense.  You have to have some strictures and rules and penalties in line, of course you have, you have to have law and order, oh of course you have.  But personally I don’t believe that you can punish a person into doing good.  No I believe that the task is quite different and more complex than that and I think some of my experiences in prison would prove that as well, that people do respond to different things.  And indeed a lot of it, my own philosophy, was based on – and I still argue that philosophy anyway but – it was about that thing I said about finding the potential in people and by the way I absolutely believe 100% that there’s potential in every human being to do good and bad.  Potential now, I’m not saying people do bad but there’s the potential to do bad in everybody and there’s also the potential to do good.  And in prison, in my time anyway, I certainly found that most prisoners wanted to do good, that’s a difference now from doing good, but they wanted to do good, their aspiration, and they got great satisfaction.  And the proof of that was, for instance, at times like the Special Olympics when they worked their backsides off day and night to make flags and to do different things in order that they could contribute to the Special Olympics and they felt great when they saw their flags down in Croke Park – 80,000 of them made by hand.  And that’s what I mean, or when they raise money for charity or whatever they do, you know, they felt because I’m helping someone so I believe that that’s how you change people, that you build and nurture the humanity in them, the talent in them, the good in them and the higher and the more you’re making them aware of their own humanity the less likely they are to be inhumane to others.  That’s my philosophy but lots of people disagree with that. Listen that’s enough of my old rubbish (laughter) because a lot of people here obviously want to maybe ask questions or say things or whatever and by the way I’m not the slightest bit defensive about the system.  If people have criticism or whatever they want to say feel free to do so because I’m not going to defend anything.  I’ve always believed actually from way back, the mid 80s onwards, and I said this in the mid 80s, prisons belong to you, not you personally I think society.  Prisons are there for you, you own them, your responsible for it in that global sense and they are yours, they’re not mine or weren’t mine or they’re not belong to the Minster or they’re not belong to the staff in our job and prisoners come from society, 99.99% of them come from Irish society in some shape or form.  I mean people living in Ireland, they come from your streets, they came through your school, they came from your communities, whoever they are, and they end up in prison and when they leave prison they go back out into your society, your community, your area and that’s why I have always said that people working in prison or managing prisons should never feel that they were failures.  They’re not failures, they belong to society, and that’s why I was highly motivated all my life anyway to try to open prisons up as much as possible to the public and we did that quite a lot with school tours, with open nights for drama, for a whole lot of different professionals like legal students and ordinary students and all sorts of people.  We tried to bring in as many as we could into Mountjoy simply to do that, to say to them this is what a prison is, it’s your prison, if you want to improve it that’s fine but at least you’ll know what it’s like.  And that’s why I did that because I believe that it’s very important that people know exactly what happens in prisons.  Prisons exist in your name and they are ours.  They’re an Irish institution funded by the Irish tax payer for a service that the Irish tax payer believe that they need and in that case then the ownership of them should be the broader community as well.  Anyway belt away any of you that have questions or criticisms or whatever.Questions and AnswersJohn: Yeah go on?Participant 1: Do you miss working in Mountjoy?John: Oh God not a bit, no.  (laughter)  And I should clarify that now because honestly now, honestly, and this is the truth, I spent 42 years and a bit in the penal service and I spent over 26 years as the Governor of Mountjoy or Portlaoise and I can honestly say I never, ever, ever woke up any morning and said “Jesus do I have to go in there?”  I enjoyed it as a challenge and I enjoyed the work and I enjoyed the relationship and I got great education in prison.  The greatest education I got in my life was definitely in prison, way, way more than anyone else and that includes my family.  And anyone that rears children, for instance, and rearing their own family will know how educational that is.  But I would have to say and do say generously that I got my greatest education in prison and my greatest satisfaction in life in prison as well.  But the time comes and I decided in 2009, that 2010, 26 years was enough of it.  I was also coming on.  I was 63 years of age at the time and I said, right, I have to retire at 65 so there’s no point in waiting until they throw you out (laughter) so I had my mind made up in 2009 that I was going in 2010 and I did.  And I can honestly say that I never regretted a moment of it.  So I’ve nothing but good memories, not happy memories because I think it would be a bit of a contradiction to say that, you know, prison and what goes on in prison could make you happy, but I suppose the happy or the fulfilment I would have gotten was trying to do something in whatever way I could for the people who end up in prison and their families.  Because I met some fantastic people, mothers and fathers, mainly mothers by the way, by and large now I’d say 85-90% of visitors to prisons are either mothers or siblings.  The rest are made up of others but mothers in particular go to prison all the time and grandmothers in many of these areas that I talked about, those six areas, grandmothers are now going up to Mountjoy to visit their grandchildren because their own children are dead as a result of drugs and that’s bigger than you think.  And it is very sad to meet a grandmother going back in after coming up 25 years ago with her own children and now she’s going back in to visit her grandchildren who are carrying on the same old traditions.  And by the way I was into, by the time I left Mountjoy, in many individual cases I’m into the third generation of families going to prison – grandparents, parents and their children.  And not a regular basis but on a frequent basis enough, a father and a son or a mother and a daughter could be in prison at the one time and that’s terrible sad. Yeah?Participant 2: Is there someone carrying on your terrific work in Mountjoy?John: Well first of all I wouldn’t dream of saying it was terrific work.  I suppose I had my own ideas and my own beliefs and my own philosophy that most people didn’t agree with by the way, so I’d have to record that first all, that it was very much my own in that sense and I suppose I discovered that early on in my career as well that if you didn’t do your own thing you’d do nothing because nobody would come down and tell you what to do or show you what to do or ... they’d knock you and criticise you but they wouldn’t innovate anything.  So from my perspective I suppose I had a philosophy based on what I said and that’s what I tried to do in the main.  And as I said that wouldn’t be very popular but I mean I suppose the prisoners in particular and their families would respond to it maybe more so than the establishment, that they saw it as a humane approach.  But anyone listen the ‘oul book is here because I might forget it.  I just want to give you a laugh.  Because the ‘oul book came out last ... and it’s not promoting the book, Jesus don’t think I’m trying to promote my book.  (laughter)  I couldn’t care less if the ‘oul book is ever sold.  (laughter) But listen to me, the ‘oul book came out last October anyway, almost 12 months ago.  And a couple of days or weeks after it being published it was one of the chaplains in Mountjoy and she was down town one day, close enough to here, down to Chapters the big book shop, and she was going to buy the book.  So she went in anyway to Chapters and she was going around and she couldn’t see the book so she asked one of the floor staff, she said “By the way where is Lonergan’s book” and he said “Ask your man behind the desk” so she said “Well what is it behind the desk for?”, “Oh he said “Thieving, thieving, they’re all robbing it.”  (laughter)  So all my friends from Mountjoy were coming in taking the book but not paying for it.  (laughter)  So when I meet them, I often meet them on the street nowadays, “I read your book” and I always say to them “I hope you paid for it.”  (laughter) John: Sorry dear?Participant 3: Would not run for President?John: Ah here now, here.  (laughter)  Hold on now.  (laughter)  The country is a bad state.  (laughs)  Yeah grand?Participant 4: Can I just ask you ...John: Yeah?Participant 4: ... what percentage of the people in Mountjoy ever got to get education?  Was that ... you said you couldn’t get enough teachers but the people that did go for education was that by their own choice or were they encouraged or how was it decided what people got to get it?John: Yeah, yeah, to get it.  Yeah first of all education is delivered in prison by the local VECs in this case Dublin City, brilliant by the way, I must record that, Dublin City, and all the VECs are very generous and very supportive and have been for over 35 years in relation to providing education.  They promote and deliver an adult education philosophy in their teaching which is that it is always voluntary and that it’s done on the basis that people want to go, so it is always voluntary.  In terms of who goes I suppose people show interest and people encourage it, like chaplains or prison staff or whoever it would be in some cases.  We had a fantastic project going in Mountjoy at one stage called the Connect Project which would have been a very progressive project where the first stage where 12 or 14 guys would sit down with a facilitator for about 6 weeks and look at their lives and look at their ambitions and set goals for themselves and then go with a monitor to monitor them and a lot of them will have said “I can’t read or write” and so step one would be to go for literacy and numeracy, basic education services.  So some of them go as I said because they’re highly motivated, because they are aware of education, and some go genuinely because they want to better themselves.  But generally speaking those who go to education, generally now speaking, are the ones that are less likely ever to come back again.  Why?  Because we can see already that they’re motivated, that they want to do something.  The problem as I keep saying, it’s one of the greatest problems, is to try to motivate people.  See a lot of people just simply say look I’ve never got anything, I never achieve anything, I never will.  There’s a little ... not too far from here ... I won’t name the area but, sorry, I have to name the area sorry, Jesus, I can’t tell you what he wrote up in Shanganagh but it is so long ago now it doesn’t matter.  But we had dormers in Shanganagh way back but it was open, by the way now that’s closed which was a desperate backward step because it had fantastic potential, an open centre for ... we have no open centre for juveniles in Ireland which is unbelievable and we have 260 or whatever it is up in St. Pat’s.  We have no open centre for them and the idea of an open centre was you took them out of that criminal environment and put them into a more caring progressive environment.  But anyway, there was a young lad and they were all in dormitories and he wrote up on the side of his dormitory, way back – this is way back in the early 70s, ‘My name is Mousey O’Brien and I come from the Hill, never worked and never will’.  And I have never forgot that simply because I said Jesus if you believe that at 16 years of age my God where’s the hope for you?  But that was the culture and that was the way he was ... so education.  Then in other prisons they have far greater ... like in the more modern prisons, they have far greater facilities and far greater opportunities and quite a significant number of prisoners would take on different types of education, some a very academic type education but not exclusively, they learn computers, they do art, they do a lot of different ... maybe I should say myself from my own experience I suppose the creative arts would be the one thing that maybe every prisoner would have a great interest in and many of them have a great capacity as well.  So artwork, drama, music – all that sort of stuff – great interest and great creativity and whether that’s a compensation for other things that they miss in life, I don’t know, but one of the things, their characteristics, would be that quite a number of people from those areas would have a background, social background, would have been very creative as people.  Some of the stuff they’ve made and created with their hands would be unbelievable, the detail and the creativity and the innovation.  So and that’s why I keep saying to people that the perception might be that they’re stupid or something, these people are not stupid.  I mean they are very, very intelligent, capable people and where you’re able to direct their energies and their abilities in another direction they would be very successful so.  And by the way as well, contrary to what people think, quite a significant number of people never go back to prison.  But if you asked anybody what’s the recidivist rate, that’s what they call people going back to prison, it’s about 80% but you see that’s very misleading because there’s huge numbers of people that go back to prison all their lives, they never leave, and the cut off point ... if you’re from a disadvantaged area in the normal sort of criminal culture you’ll probably go to prison, if you go, in your middle to late teens or special institutions and you’ll continue till your early 30s and then almost dramatically 90% of them disappear.  So they spend all their latter teens and most of their 20s in and out of prison and then they just stop.  Now is that because they grow up?  Is it because they form relationships?  Is it because they have children of their own?  Is it they get tired of prison?  Is it they’re not caught again?  Because you see these sort of statistic are very misleading because I mean a person could be still robbing away, for instance, at his heart’s content and not be caught and people would be saying ‘ah he’s never robbed since’.  So the statistics, the research, I suppose I’d be saying myself and again Liam would be advocating again we’re very weak on research.  We don’t have enough of ... and why don’t we?  Because Government don’t want research because in groups like the Irish Penal Reform Trust and people who do make referencing the more information you have, the more statistics you have, the more research you have, the stronger your voice is because you can go in and say look this is what’s happening.  The Government aren’t stupid and bureaucracy isn’t stupid and they say right, give them that ammunition sure they’ll come in and they’ll beat you with that ammunition so don’t give them ammunition in the first place and they won’t be able to beat you.  So we do need to look at these things a lot more and to identify where the crises are, where the answers are, what works best.  There’s no evaluation done in prison on any programmes that are in prisons.  No evaluations done, there’s no ... and that was one great part of the Connect Project there was ongoing evaluation even by an outside agency, the National Training Agency.  So they were monitoring and measuring is it working?  And if it wasn’t working they’d say well that project isn’t working.  And that’s what you need really, you need evaluation ongoing to know whether what you’re doing is right or wrong.  But I mean prison itself you spend about 16/17 hours a day every day locked up in a cell.  That’s the reality.Participant 5: And Thornton Hall, all the fuss over Thornton Hall and the price of the land and everything else, did you agree with Thornton Hall or was it in the wrong place?John: Oh God yeah, of course it was.  (laughter) I suppose I mean Thornton Hall I suppose from day one almost I suppose it’s 10km, 6 miles, from Finglas Village and there’s no bus service there so I was always arguing myself that if you lived in certain parts of Dublin city, for instance, you have to get a bus and most, 99% of people going to prison have no transport of their own so you have to get a bus, for example, from Ballyfermot into town, get a bus from town up to Finglas and then be above in Finglas waiting for someone to collect you, maybe an old van or something, to bring you 6 more miles out into the middle of the country, have your visit maybe with two or three little children, the visit is over, get back again to Finglas, wait for the bus into town and get the bus back home.  I’d say it would be the best part of a day’s work.  You could imagine trying to do that with two or three little children.Participant 5: So there was no consultation at all?John: None whatsoever no, none whatsoever and which is another ... not amazing thing but another sad reality.  The areas where most of the prisoners come from, the communities there, there are fantastic communities in some of those areas, wonderful work being done for people who leave prison and for the families of prisoners, children, while they’re in prison, and no consultation good, bad or indifferent with those communities even.  No information sharing.  And so that just doesn’t happen that sort of prospect that you’re talking about, asking people where would a good location be.  And finally then myself I’m a great old advocate myself of having prisons in the public eye.  I’m a great believer of that.  You’re walking down the North Circular Road at the moment on the right hand side Out-Patients, the Mater Hospital, sick people, on the left hand side Mountjoy Prison, St. Patrick’s Institution, the Women’s Prisons, it reminds people that we have prisoners.  That there’s people in there who are prisoners, their ours, they may have offended us but they’re ours and it keeps them in your mind.  If they’re out in the middle of nowhere like in England now where you have big ... and the first thing they did with Thornton Hall was they ordered hundreds and hundreds of trees to plant all around the periphery, which they are by the way, and the idea is that they’ll grow and then nobody will ever know there’s a prison there.  And I would say out of sight out of mind.  I think it’s very important that all of us from time to time are reminded that there are such things, such people, as prisoners, they are our people and it is in our interests that we see them.  Because finally I suppose I should make this point to you because you might say ‘well he’s all about prisoners’, well I am because that was my job, because I saw that was my job to look after prisoners, it wasn’t to look after society in a broader context and you’re going say ‘well what about the victim?’.  See my philosophy would be that if I could turn the prisoner away from crime I was automatically turning away ... reducing the number of victims, that was my philosophy.  The more ... and there’s no contradiction in my mind between looking after victims, supporting victims, being good to victims and also being progressive in prisons.   There’s no contradiction.  I’d say we should be doing both enthusiastically but we do nothing for victims actually in the country.  Nothing.  Or very little in terms of support and counselling and therapy for people who are traumatised as a result of crime.  My job was to try to change people away from criminality and I always believed that if you could move people away from criminality you were making a massive contribution to reducing victims and the suffering of victims because at the end of the day they are the people who suffer most just in case people don’t think I appreciate them.  Well the figures are ... the question is what money, what does it cost to keep a prisoner?  It’s falling in the last number of years.  Why?  Because of overcrowding.  Like we have more prisoners in the same space with the same numbers of staff or less staff and actually the cost of prison is falling as a result.  Of course the quality of life in prison is reducing as well but the cost is running around 75,000 a year at the moment on average and it’s around 200,000 a year to keep someone in Portlaoise because of the added security.  So you’re talking around 75,000 to 80,000 Euro a year to keep somebody in a prison, that’s what it costs.  In terms of I suppose ... oh someone one time proposed this wonderful idea that for every Euro you’d spend on a prison the Government should be forced to spend 2 Euro on the outside on prevention and I would be a great supporter of that.  I think that if those six areas for instance – and we know where they are and we know the size of them and we know the issues that are in – I honestly believe that if they were really tackling it in a meaningful way through education and through work and through improving the living conditions and the environment I honestly believe that there would be a significant reduction in the numbers going to prison.  And I think that while initially people would see like Moyross, the regeneration of Moyross or Ballymun, they’d say oh how can they justify spending so much, hundreds of millions, in these areas.  I believe that in 10-15 years time the real value of that will be we’ll be seeing a dramatic reduction in the number of people going to prison.  The age?  The average age, again, we’re reading up on that because we don’t have ... I can only tell you in 1997 is the last time we had really scientific research done into that and at that stage the average age was 27 but two thirds of them were under 27, if you get me.  Because an older person you see, a 70/80 year old, would completely distort the average age in prison because we’d have a smaller number of people in their 80s, mainly sex offenders, in prison and they would distort the average age.  But about two thirds were in the bracket of 18 to 27 so it is fundamentally and basically a young person.  And prison and crime is a young person’s thing anyway because I mean I see a lot of older men now, they wouldn’t be that old relatively speaking but they’d be in their 50s, but they would have been regulars in Mountjoy.  I see quite a lot of them around the city now and they would be, you know, homeless and they’d be drinking wine but they wouldn’t be committing crime anymore or very little crime because they’re too old.  They’d say that to you themselves.  And a lot of them would meet me on the street and say “Ah Jesus I’m too old now for that” (laughter), they actually realise that they’re too old and they couldn’t hack it.  And what drives older fellas crazy in prison is they meet young fellas, because young fellas are full of energy going around and that drives them crazy because they want to relax and have a quiet life and the young lads are all buzzing.  And most people in prison would have ... and I suppose I’d often say this as well ... most people in prison would have many, many personal issues and emotional issues, psychological issues, mental issues.  1 in 4, by the way in 1997, had a history of being an in-patient in a psychiatric hospital, 1 in 4.  There’s no community anywhere else except a psychiatric hospital where you would have that level of psychiatric illness and 40% had contact with the psychiatric service, so that’s a huge level of psychiatric background difficulties that people had.  And then when you’d add on addiction, you know, you can see where between addiction and psychiatric illness we’ve a massive difficulty in terms of the sort of problems that people have.  Learning difficulties would be massive as well, often never, ever discovered, you know, serious like dyslexia, behavioural difficulties, ADHD, all these sort of issues would be prevalent in prison population as well.  And a lot of it would never have been detected or treated.  In some cases they would have been diagnosed but never got the follow-on treatment like counselling and support and the like and quite a number of them would go through education, for instance, through primary and never be discovered that they were dyslexic and maybe years later they discover it and get help and then of course say oh Jesus their lives have changed instantly because now the problem that they had in school was gone.  And that’s what we mean by early intervention.  I’ll give you a good one, Barnardo’s,  I’m on the board of Barnardo’s, I just came from a meeting before in there and Fergus Finley the Chief Executive of Barnardo’s is tired saying it, he said “If you spend on early intervention you’ll save on the consequences often” and no I’d totally agree with him because if you could support families at the very early stages and we now know that from when you’re 3 or 4 years of age it’s an absolutely crucial age, not 15 or 16, 3 or 4 years of age, that’s when the child is really going to make that real significant move in way or the other and so we should be focusing on the disadvantaged areas where there’s a varying lack of resources and facilities.  And sometimes I have to say as well parenting skills are often very ... no fault, no criticism of the parents, but they are low on the skills of parenting, well I mean they need that sort of support and help as well.  And where it is in Barnardo’s they’re doing wonderful work all around Dublin city and other places and it will be very interesting because they are doing a dilation as they’re going along and it will be very interesting to see in 10 years time, for instance, will that make a huge difference in some of the areas because they are working in the most socially disadvantaged areas.  Helping mums, helping families, helping communities from baby, from pregnancy upwards, helping the mums and it’ll be very interesting to see will that make a difference.  I believe it will, a significant difference, but we have to wait and see.Participant 5: Has the education always been available to prisoners and do prisoners have access to facilities like pool tables?John: No, now well first of all in a place like Mountjoy education isn’t available to all simply because there are no facilities there and 40 people sign up for education, maybe 100 in total would be at some element of education and about 600 wouldn’t and that’s basically because they don’t have the facilities to facilitate it.  In relation to activities and things like pool tables in every wing of the prison there’s probably a pool table or a snooker table but there would also be about 150 to 170 prisoners availing of that facility in that area so while you can say they have pool tables the reality is that they might get a game of snooker once a week because there’d be so many people, you know, vying for the one facility.  So you have snooker tables and television and things like that but of course the demand for them also has to be linked into the amount of the facilities that are there.  The recreation facilities in Mountjoy are diabolical, that’s it in a nutshell.  Simply because when the place was built there was no recreation and they didn’t build it with that in mind so anything that’s there now is done on the basis of ad hoc, opening up an old basement area, converting a number of cells into a recreation area, all that sort of stuff.  The workshops are not purpose built, they’re just converted cells.  So the facilities were never built into the place when they were building it in 1850 and now the room isn’t there to expand, to provide the facilities that you really need.  Listen thank you very much anyway you’re very good.  (clapping)  Thanks Padraic.  (recording ends here)Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to Johnny Connolly's talk.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode criminologist Johnny Connolly outlines current research and policy on the broad areas of crime and drugs, and also discusses crime statistics and recent trends in drug consumption. Recorded in front of a live audience in the Central Library on 8 September 2011 as part of its 'Crime and the City' series.Very happy to be here.  Happy to be invited.  Right, well what I’m going to do is start by looking at what we think we know about drug related crime.  Now first of all when we talk about drug related crime, we’re talking about illicit drugs and the reason I’m talking about illicit drugs is because certain substances have been made legal through statute often as a result of international obligations and our main sort of drugs legislation are based in the 1977 Misuse of Drugs Act.  Now later on hopefully in a bit of discussion we can talk about some contemporary issues.  One particular issue is the whole issue of so-called head shops and psychotropic substances and new substances, every week apparently a new substance is being created and the challenges that creates for any legislative system or any system of criminal deterrents.  So we’ll have a little chat about that.  I want to start, however, by just talking a little bit about the background to the issue of drug related crime.  And then I’m going to talk about the official picture and that is what people talk about or what you read in the newspapers often about the, you know, where politicians say the crime rate is increasing or decreasing etc., I’m going to sort of interrogate that a little bit and see what exactly that means.  And then I’m going to look at what we referred to as the dark figure of drug related crime, what that picture, that official picture, doesn’t tell us.  And then I’m going to go through the various models that look at ... that have emerged to try and explain the connection between illicit drug use and offending behaviour.  And there are four sort of dominant models that have emerged in the literature to explain the connection because people sort of assume that’s it quite simple but it’s actually a very complex area in terms of determining the causative connection between the use of illicit drugs and offending behaviour.  Most people who use illicit drugs don’t commit any offence whatsoever expect the offence of possession and that’s something that we can touch on as well.  I’m then going to go into a little bit, you know, in a more sort of topical way looking at how we understand the drugs phenomenon in a Dublin context in particular.  The way in which different sort of perspectives within society have responded to the problem, the way in which the State has responded, the way in which communities most affected by the problems have responded and then maybe we’ll start talking about other different approaches that are debated – legalisation, decriminalisation and various other models that have emerged perhaps in Portugal or in the Netherlands etc.  So hopefully, you know, be as interactive as you want, feel free to cut across and at the end hopefully we’ll have time for a bit of a discussion.  Now the photographs I’m using and I’m trying not to be overly academic here so I’ve used photographs that have been taken by a friend of mine called Ronnie Close.  And myself and Ronnie worked on a project in the mid 1990s where we were looking at the whole revival of the anti-drugs movement that emerged at that time and for those who aren’t familiar with this the drug phenomenon, particularly heroin, really impacted in the north inner city in the late 70s and early 1980s.  At that time a movement emerged made up of what was referred to as ‘the concerned parents against drugs’ because there was a perception that the State and that the police either couldn’t or wouldn’t respond adequately to the problem.  This phenomenon emerged again in the mid 1990s, particularly with the emergence of ecstasy and the whole rave scene and then the resurgence in a way of heroin back onto the scene and a number of drug related deaths, particularly in inner city Dublin communities and in sort of economically deprived parts of the area of Dublin as a whole. And then we had sort of a quite ... what you might refer to as a watershed and that was the murder of Veronica Guerin, a journalist, in 1996 by people allegedly connected to the trade in drugs.  And that led to a major reaction from the State in terms of legislation and that sort of approach has really been sustained over time like there was sort of a renewal of the whole sort of what is being referred to as ‘the war on drugs’ at that time.  It was a major challenge to the democratic institutions of the State that a journalist was murdered who had been prominent in writing about people involved in drug related crime and gangland and those involved in gangs etc., associated with drugs and this was what was perceived a major symbolic threat to the State and so it was quite an important watershed.  So we’ll talk later about all of that.Now I’m going to go through ... and then we’ll talk a little bit about the challenge in recent times as a result of head shops and also the Internet and the challenge that has created for people trying to legislate against psychoactive substances which are changing so rapidly and which can be sold so easily over the Internet etc. Now I’m going to show a couple of graphs and I hope you can see them easily enough.  And this reflects what I refer to as the official picture.  Now when you read in the newspapers or you hear coming up to election time in particular where one group of politicians are saying that this group are soft on crime and the other group are saying that we’re hard on crime and we’re tough on crime and then one group will come back and say but drug crimes are increasing or crimes associated with drugs are increasing dramatically, now what we’re actually talking about in that debate is very little in terms of what actually is happening but what the statistics, the official picture, is telling us is really what the police are doing.  They are a reflection of law enforcement activity.  So, for example, the statistics that we see are produced largely by Customs and by the Garda Síochána who have the main responsibility in the State for the prosecution of drug offences.  But those statistics are determined by the resources of these agencies, by their ability to detect drugs, by the ability of those involved in the trade to conceal their drugs and to evade detection.  So really what these figures are telling us is about what the police do in response in carrying out their mandate to enforce drug offences, the offences contained in the Misuse of Drugs Act.  And the main offences that are prosecuted are possession, or what we refer to as simple possession, it’s a Section 3 offence, possession often for personal use, amounts of a substance, most cannabis and then drug supply, Section 15, where you are prosecuted for the possession and distribution of drugs.  And then you’ve a couple of other offences that sort of are dominant such as obstruction where you might try and throw drugs down a toilet or you might try and resist arrest and this is another dominant area.  Cultivation of drugs, personal cultivation is an area that has increasingly been ... it’s increasingly dominating headlines and we’re hearing about factories where people are producing their own drugs.  Now again is this a real increase in this phenomenon or are we just seeing law enforcement focusing more on it and this is a very difficult one to know. Now what you see here if you follow the yellow line, that’s the total drug offences between 1993 and 2005.  The pink line is for possession and the blue line is for supply.  So what that tells us immediately is that the main trend in drug offences is determined by possession offences.  That is the bulk of the offences that are prosecuted through the courts.  If you notice something interesting there as well, in 1997 you see that the line jumps up very rapidly.  Now I think that that is because of the murder of Veronica Guerin in 1996 and what you saw was this major reaction by the State but in terms of statistics where you’d see politicians say we’re winning the fight against drugs etc., what you see in actual practice is a huge increase in people being prosecuted for the simple possession of cannabis not really what you would see as a very significant response to that murder.  Now a number of other things happened as well of course which we’ll talk about, but all I’m trying to illustrate here is the way in which statistics can be so revealing but also the way in which they can conceal so much of what is actually happening.  Now again this shows you that most of the offences that are prosecuted are for Cannabis as the line sort of very clearly follows each other, the possession, most of the possession offences are related to cannabis so most of the prosecutions that we see in the statistics are for people possessing cannabis for personal use.  Now I’m not offering any moral position on this, that is the law, the law must be enforced, but that is also what is actually happening.  And of course there is a huge debate as to the legal status of cannabis and it is probably one of the most hotly contested issues within this whole area both publicly and in terms of the literature etc. Here we look at prosecutions for heroin and prosecutions for cocaine between 1995 and 2005, over that decade.  And what is interesting if you look at the pink line which is cocaine through the whole Celtic Tiger era you saw cocaine moving beyond its sort of idea as the rich man’s drug contained within sort of a certain section of society.  And heroin was seen as a drug that was always associated with those really on the margins of society, what we refer to as dependent or problematic users.  But what you see is a steady increase in prosecutions of cocaine until it eventually eclipses heroin for the first time in the history of the State in around 2004.  Now another thing that tells us is that this data can be useful, it can show us trends in what is actually going on and it’s an indirect indicator of availability.  You can compare say police data with treatment data and that can help you build up a picture of what actually is going on. This is one that I think is very interesting and this is under 17 year olds prosecuted by gender from 1995 to 2005.  Now if you look at that you’ll see that the number of females remains very low and relatively steady while the number of males increases year on year pretty much dramatically over the decade.  Now is that because more boys are using or is it something else?  And it doesn’t reflect, say, use of alcohol by girls because what we have seen in alcohol data is that the use of alcohol by girls is actually coming closer over that period of time to the use of alcohol by males and sometimes alcohol and illicit drug use can be sort of comparable to a certain degree.  There’s another way that might be ... there’s another explanation.  For example, when young people are stopped and searched for a girl to be searched there needs to be a female guard present but there is a lot less female guards than there are male guards so possibly it could be that.  If I was a teenager and I was walking down the street with drugs it would be the girl who’d be carrying them because she’d be less likely to be stopped, to be searched, to be detected and what that tells us is the way in which statistics or production of the discretionary behaviour of law enforcement, the way in which often the picture that we think we have is a picture that has been constructed by the day to day activities of law enforcement.  Because I don’t think that picture really reflects what is going on out there.  And you could also argue from the perspective of young males that that is discriminatory police behaviour and this young male I think would probably agree with you.  (laughter) Now if we look at drug offences more recently again we have seen a consistent increase – that’s a bit difficult to read  - but the broken line at the top is total drug offences, the second one is drug possession and the third one is supply and again we can see that supply is relatively consistent, the trend in the total number is really determined by simple possession.  If we look more recently as well what we can see is – and this is an interesting phenomena in recent times – a decline as the Celtic Tiger and people’s disposable income has declined we have seen a simultaneous decline in the use of illicit substances or at least in their detection.  Now I wouldn’t say that that reflects any difference in police behaviour, I’d say it actually is probably a more accurate reflection of people’s actual use of illicit substances because other surveys, other studies, have also reflected this decline.  Again if we look here we can see the dark broken line is ecstasy and that’s an interesting phenomenon because where in the mid 1990s you had huge seizures of ecstasy and it was a very popular drug, what this tells us is that it was a culturally relevant drug.  It emerged at a particular time, probably associated with the rave culture, it was popular at a certain time, but something else might be happening there as well and that is the growth, the emergence of head shops and the use of other substances that might have mirrored ecstasy or mirrored cocaine, for example mephedrone, which increased and became popular and possibly displaced the use of ecstasy.  Sort of the other line there, the sort of smaller dots on it, that’s cocaine and that’s interesting where you see this rapid decrease in cocaine and again I would say that reflects the lesser availability of disposable income for people and the lesser use of cocaine.  And then heroin at the bottom is relatively consistent because heroin is a drug that often those who use it who are dependent drug users the economic circumstances don’t really matter to them, it’s what we refer to in economic terms as an economically inelastic demand for that drug because if it becomes more expensive people will rob more to pay for it.  And the economic circumstances don’t really matter because there is a serious dependency or a serious addiction.  So it doesn’t as easily as other drugs, such as cocaine, it doesn’t necessarily reflect people’s disposable income. But what are we missing?  Firstly, in general when we talk about crime and the law that is there politicians, when they respond to crime, maybe they’ll pass some legislation.  Now that’s fine but we know very little about how that legislation is actually enforced.  We know next to nothing about how that legislation is actually enforced.  We also know very little in this country.  In the UK, for example, we know that about 1 out of the 4 crimes that are committed upon people are actually reported to the police.  Now the reason we know that is because what they do, they’ve been doing it since the 1980s, they’ve been comparing the official picture from the police data with self report studies that are conducted every year.  So they look at the official picture and they ask people were you a victim of crime in the last year?  And they say yes.  Well did you report it?  No we didn’t.  Why didn’t you?  Well there was no point, nothing would happen.  There was no insurance potential.  I couldn’t be bothered.  The police wouldn’t do anything, nothing would happen.  So actually in terms of the crime picture what we are seeing is only a very small part of the picture of crime.  If we go into certain types of crimes, for example, shop lifting.  Only 1 out of 11 shoplifting offences are actually reported.  If we look at bicycle thefts it’s even higher.  So in terms of our picture of crime, in terms of the official picture it is extremely limited in terms of reflecting what is actually happening.  And even when people do report crimes that doesn’t mean they’re actually ever recorded.  For example, a study in the UK showed that 40% of crimes reported to the police weren’t recorded.  Perhaps the police office at the time didn’t think it was a crime, didn’t believe it was important enough.  Maybe they were finishing their shift and they couldn’t be bothered and all of these things have been shown as reasons why this might be the case and again human behaviour is an important element of this and discretionary behaviour in terms of how our picture of crime is affected.  But the dark figure of crime, that’s what we call this, is much higher for drug related crime because a lot of drug related crime never enters the official picture.  A lot of drug related offences, like serious ones, are never reported and one of the main reasons for this is because people are fearful of those involved in the drug trade.  Other times people don’t care, if they see somebody smoking a joint or they see somebody, a crime is being committed but it’s their business, it’s not really that important and there are much more serious crimes and we know in this country, of course, that the really serious crimes aren’t often seen as crimes, for example, tax evasion.  I remember having a conversation with a business man one time and it took me about an hour to explain that tax evasion was actually a crime and that was a culture that we are beginning to see the consequences of now, that only certain crimes on the criminal statute books have ever been enforced.  And so crime is also… and who we see as offenders is also a production of how society determines what’s important to prosecute and what’s not important. Most of what we know in terms of crime or as we see crime it relates to street level crime – theft, burglary, robbery, assault, etc.  That is the sort of bread and butter of what we would determine as crime and those we would see as criminals are often referred to as police property groups, the people that the police prosecute on a day-to-day basis, usually young working class males make up the bulk of the offender.  And if you look at, say, those in prison, for example, the vast majority of those in Mountjoy prison come from three postal districts in Dublin.  And that is also a reflection of the discretionary nature of the system.  Certain people are stopped.  Certain people are arrested.  And certain people the way they talk back to the guards might determine whether they will be actually prosecuted or not.  Or where they are from, the whole attitude test, do they pass the attitude test?  Certain people for the same offence might be likely to get a custodial sentence while others would not and that is the whole discretionary nature of the criminal justice system and that makes up our picture.Now there are four dominant models explaining the link between drug use and crime.  The first is what we refer to as the psychopharmacological model, which says that there is something within the property of the substance that leads to the offending behaviour.  Intoxication where it might cause criminal especially violent behaviour, now research has shown a very strong connection between offending behaviour and the consumption of alcohol.  There’s a consistent association between violent crime and alcohol and I don’t think that would be huge news for most of us here.  But the link between offending behaviour and particularly violent crime has been refuted with regards to heroin and cannabis.  There is some evidence for crack cocaine.  There is some evidence for heroin particularly where people are interfered with if they have heroin in their possession or if they are shooting up there can be a violent reaction but really the link, the violent link, has not been proven.  It is in the social environment, the context in which drugs are used is a much more important indicator of violence than the actual psychopharmacological effect of the substance themselves.  The second important link is what we refer to as the economic compulsive or the acquisitive and this would be one that would be most dominant probably in most of our minds, where people are committing crimes to feed their habit.  This has been proven in terms of research, international and Irish research that we have seen an increase in economically motivated crimes after addiction.  After people become dependent on drugs and when they are in an effective, well-resourced treatment programme, for example, methadone maintenance with other supports, we have seen a reduction in offending behaviour.  So again that proves from the other side, from the treatment side, a clear connection between economically motivated crimes and addiction. I’m going to show you a couple of police studies that were done here which I think are interesting.  What they show and what a lot of other data shows is that an increase in employment and the availability of treatment has seen a very large reduction in economically motivated crimes here in Ireland.  Another important point, however, is that those who are dependent on drugs are far more likely to be caught offending than those who are not dependent on drugs.  The police know who they are because they’re essentially their bread and butter, they’re picking them up every day or they’re stopping them every day.  So somebody who is let’s say a chaotic drug user or a dependent or problematic user is much more likely to be stopped and prosecuted than somebody who is not dependent.  For example, somebody who uses drugs at the weekend, a recreational user who goes to work on a Monday morning, they do not appear in the statistics.  They’re not generally stopped, they’re not prosecuted etc.  And their use of the substance is manageable, they are managing it and they’re not engaging in serious crime, in any crime beyond possession, so they don’t appear really. Just very quickly, two studies were done, one that got a huge lot of attention in 1997.  It was a Garda study and they asked a number of people who they knew were dependent drug users a series of questions and then a sort of follow-up study, not as strong a study, was done in 2004 again by the Garda Research Unit.  And just to go through a couple of the findings, those who found as crime as their main source of income, in 1997 it was 59% in 2004 it was 13%.  Now at that time, in 2004, there was a huge increase in employment.  There was an almost levelling out of unemployment.  Unemployment was effectively gone at that time.  And what that tells us is that people who are dependent on drugs can also maintain a job so it sort of breaks that sort of stigma that we have, that people were actually maintaining employment, at some level, and also maintaining their drug use and it was serious drug use, heroin primarily.  And again the unemployment rate was far less in the latter study than in 1997.  The drug first used was cannabis and that’s been fairly consistent, although if we exclude tobacco and we exclude alcohol cannabis was the drug first used.  First introduced to drugs by a friend, and this again is consistent, is 81% and 86% and that’s very consistent with all studies I’m aware of, that people are first introduced to illicit drugs by someone who they know, by a family member or a friend.  Now why that’s a very important point is that there is this perception of drug dealers as the stranger at the school gate, as it’s put, preying on people.  Actually most people are introduced to drugs by somebody that they know and somebody that is close to them and that must question our whole understanding of the drug dealing enterprise and how people actually become involved in drugs in the first place.  Drugs sourced from a local dealer had increased from 46% to 76% and what that tells me anyway is that drug markets are far more integrated into local communities.  We must also remember that the mobile phone became very, you know, everyone had mobile phones and anyone with a mobile phone and a list of names can be a drug dealer and they’re very difficult to detect from a policing perspective.  So an easier access to drugs was also facilitated by the mobile phone.  The number who had been to prison had decreased slightly and the estimated daily expenditure, allowing for inflation etc., wasn’t that different.  And an interesting finding was the movement from the Punt to the Euro and honestly people aren’t going to start looking for change on the street, like you know it’s 12.5 Euro from 10 Punts so what is that, 7.50?  You know, that’s not going to happen.  So really what happened was that the legitimate market wasn’t followed in the illegitimate market, changes that took place in the legitimate markets where prices largely increased to allow for the Euro in the illegitimate market there was no real change, it was just rounded figures was all that was important.  And systemic crime is crimes committed as a consequence of the fact that drugs are illegal and there is an illicit market.  And we refer to these as systemic types of crime.  How we understand this, we look at things like drug seizures, drug prices, drug purities, drug roots, price impurity.  If the purity of drugs is lower will the price be lower?  And in any studies that I’ve conducted here anyway and there are very few there doesn’t seem to be a huge connection between price and purity, certainly not at a street level.  If somebody keeps giving somebody crap, as it’s referred to, they will simply go to a different dealer but it doesn’t seem to be reflected in changes in price.  But you would assume also let’s say for example if there’s a lower availability you would assume that prices would increase following basic demand and supply.  And yet what we have seen is that drug prices have decreased in Ireland over the last number of years while availability hasn’t really been affected.  So these are the sorts of indicators we try and use to understand the market. We have seen sort of a stabilisation of markets over time and often we look at drug markets, as a simple way of explaining, as involving three levels, you have the import level, you have what we refer to as the middle market level and then you have the street level.  And then you have what we refer to at street level as open and closed markets, so an open market might be a market on the street where you can go up and you can be a complete stranger and they would sell you drugs and there was a time in Dublin, particularly when there was all those street protests and marches were taking place, when you did have a lot of that around the city.  It still exists but it’s less open in the sense that often you have to know the person that your getting drugs off so we use the concept of open and closed markets to describe this type of thing.  You might have closed markets in that they take place in clubs, in night clubs, and again you would have to know the person or be introduced to the person by somebody who is trusted before you will get drugs.  And also one of the reasons that forces markets from open to closed is because of police undercover operations which are a major factor of policing in the illicit drug trade where they pose as drug users or people looking for drugs and as a consequence people are increasingly cautious about who they are buying and selling from.  Local drug markets are particularly important of course, particularly open ones, because they cause huge community disturbance.  People see them all the time.  People who are trying to get treatment have to run through a gauntlet of drug dealers which is an extremely difficult thing to do.  Also for younger people they might be attracted to the money that is being made particularly in very socio and economically deprived communities, so open drug markets are attractive to young people and they are problematic from that perspective as well because they are seen as legitimate.  If they are happening openly without interference well then there must be something okay about them so they are particularly important.  In terms of the involvement of organised crime and organised crime is a term that I think requires a lot of like analysis because two people and recently we’ve had legislation on organised crime but two or three people can be organised.  They can arrange something together but does that mean they can be referred to as organised crime?  Yes it does in one way but it’s not what we understand by organised crime.  And this is something, a study that I’m completing at the moment, it’s the first national study on illicit drug markets which is taking place in four locations around the country where I’ve tried to address those types of questions – how are drug markets structured?  Who is involved?  What sort of roles do they perform?  And these types of questions.  Because in a way you have to look at like an ordinary market, like a legitimate market, because there are massive profits to be made but there are exchanges, there is supply, there is demand, etc., and these are important. So how organised is organised crime?  Europol has looked, has sort of compared different types of markets and it says one of the unique things about the Irish market is that it involves families, that at a certain higher level it is very much centred around families.  In a lot of other countries of course it would be centred around perhaps particular ethnic groups.  Now one study I conducted here in Dublin was on crack cocaine, there’s a copy of that at the back, and that found that crack cocaine initially in around 2005 was associated with West Africans, initially.  Or else people coming back from England who had the ability to wash up cocaine into crack and so that was an interesting factor in that it was something that was associated with a new ethnic group emerging here who had the know-how, who had the ability, but that is no longer the case now throughout the city.  And then there’s the final model, this is called the common cause model, where illicit drug use and offending behaviour are common factors of perhaps a deviant lifestyle.  One doesn’t necessarily lead to the other but they are both factors of other things or consequences of other things, they’re not causally linked but they’re produced by underlining social factors such as inequality, deprivation, etc.  And just to go through this list studies that have been conducted here since the 1990s, since Paul O’Mahony conducted a major study and he’s speaking here I think in a couple of weeks on a sociological and criminological profile of Mountjoy prisoners and he went through ... and nothing has emerged to say that this profile is any different today, that most were single male age 14 to 30, they were urban, living in the parental home, from large and often broken families.  They left school before the minimum age of 16.  They were from areas with high levels of unemployment.  Their best ever job in the lowest socioeconomic class.  They had a high number of previous convictions and rates of recidivism – where they’ve been to prison before.  They had a history of family members being in prison and they were from local authority housing and areas of high levels of long-term unemployment.  The common cause model is probably the most under-investigated model but it is also probably the most important.  But from a policymaker’s perspective it is a much more difficult model to handle because the common cause model says that a drug policy on its own is not going to solve the drug problem or the drugs and crime problem.  Unless you look at all of the socio and economic context in which drug use and crime take place you can’t fix the problem and so it’s a much more challenging reality from a policymaking perspective.Participant 1: Sorry there, if that is the case, and you clearly have this well researched, have successive governments that the research board has been informing are they are taking any of this kind of research on board?Johnny: Well they are.  I mean like the National Drugs Strategy combines five pillars including demand reduction, supplier reduction, treatment, education and rehabilitation and research so in a sense the model is right and it’s quite a well-respected approach.  So it is acknowledging those multiple dimensions.  Now if you’re talking specifically about crime, however, and the causes and the solutions to crime they can not only be policing solutions or imprisonment etc., certainly not that, they must be responded to in a more holistic way.  So I think that is ... I don’t think that anybody who doesn’t realise that is the case but translating it into actual policy is much more challenging because there is no quick fix solution to that.Participant 1: Yeah it’s long term.Johnny: It’s a long-term societal change, it’s not just about introducing the policy with 50 action points, it’s a much broader societal change that you have to address.  For example, if you look at the initiative that was taken in Limerick, that was a multi-faceted approach to that problem involving changing infrastructure, looking at education, looking at pre-school, looking at family support and that is the way you address not only the drug problem but the crime problem and that’s the important thing that this, the common cause type of research, has shown. So just to summarise the link between drugs and crime, most drug users do not commit crimes other than those of possession.  There’s a link between some forms of illicit drug use and crime and particularly violent crime, some forms of illicit drug use and crime mostly heroin and cocaine.  Most problematic users receive prison sentences for drug related offences rather than drug offences.  And just a point to explain what I mean by that.  There’s a major crisis of overcrowding in our prisons and increasingly this is getting some attention and a lot of international organisations, recently the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, has focused on this major issue and the inspector for prisons has written a lot about this very serious crisis within the prison system.  Most of those who are dependent drug users receive very short sentences of between 3 to 6 months in prison so they’re obviously not seen as a threat to society if they’re only serving such short sentences.  And clearly given the state of the prisons, although the treatment in prisons has improved a lot since about 2006, clearly that is not the answer to somebody who is a dependent problematic addicted person.  Now legislation is to be introduced to basically force judges to consider non-custodial sentences for anybody who they would have given a 1-year sentence and that has to be most dependent drug users.  And that is a question again for society that we have to look at different ways of treating people who are dependent users and a very highly stigmatised group of people as well, people will serious health problems.  This is a very important finding, most problematic users began their criminal career before their drug use so it wasn’t drugs that led them to commit crime, they were already committing crimes.  So drugs didn’t cause crime, their offending behaviour had already begun.  Now drug use and particularly addiction would have increased the rate of their offending behaviour but it didn’t cause it in the first place so if you’re trying to address the cause you have to address the cause of crime in the first place.  So there’s no clear causal link between drug use and crime, there is links proven between alcohol and violent crime and that is clear in the evidence.Again although there is so much concern about illicit drug use, although we read in our newspapers every day about some gangland killing and there is a lot of public concern and public fear and there are huge amounts of legislation out there to address it, we know very little about illicit drug markets in Ireland.  We know almost nothing.  The research that has been done, the research I’ve done say on crack cocaine was the first study that really tried to address this as a market and the dynamics of a market and tried to apply that sort of logic to it.  If you’re trying to interfere or you’re trying to intervene and address it I think you have to start approaching it in that way.  What brings people into it?  What sort of profits are being made?  And these types of questions, how is structured?  How many people are involved?  And this research has been done.  Early next year there will be a study that is finished now which is due to be published by the National Advisory Committee on Drugs and ourselves, in the Health Research Board, which again looks at drug markets from that perspective, looking at four markets around the country, you know, one city, one suburban area, one inner city area, one regional town, to try and get a sense of different types of markets and how they evolve, how they are organised and structured and how we respond to them.  And that’s the other point, there’s almost no research done on what the police are actually doing.  We see the statistics, the data, the graphs and the trends that I’ve shown, but we don’t know how many people are stopped and searched.  We don’t know how the legislation is being implemented?  How many people are stopped and searched and who are they?  How many of them are arrested?  What happens those people?Participant 2: Have people tried to get that information?  I mean I used to work as a journalist and I know it’s extremely difficult to get information out of the guards, have there been attempts to get that kind of information?Johnny: Well it’s not something ... I mean the IT system in the guards has improved dramatically, in the PULSE system – Police Using Leading Systems Effectively – it’s called.  That has improved dramatically but it was never introduced for the journalists and for researchers, it was introduced as an operational factor.  Now something that is improving is the connection between the different parts of the system, for example, the police, the prosecutor’s office, the courts and the prisons because there’s no connection, in terms of trying to understand it from a research perspective or a journalistic perspective.  You can’t follow people through the system, you know, and that’s something that we have been very weak at, it is to improve and it is improving slowly but it doesn’t ... and also let’s say if you go deeper than that, like there’s a huge amount of what we would refer to as captured data, for example, those being prosecuted, you know, the sort of research that I’m interested in and the guards worked very closely with this research project in a huge way.  They have cooperated with it.  So I think it is not only about that resistance because it’s not their ... like this is something now that is not only an Irish thing, this is something that the European Commission, Europol and an organisation called the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction in Lisbon are now collaborating on developing indicators to understand the connections between drugs and crime and supply reduction efforts and that is only now really developing.  And that’s the other point, we don’t know how many people are committing offences as a consequence of a drug addiction, we don’t know that, what we refer to as the attributable cause of the offence.  So, you know, in prison they are drug offenders but most of them, as I said, are in there because of an addiction and a crime committed as a consequence of that addiction but we don’t know how many.  We know the numbers using methadone within the prison system so clearly they are people who have a very serious drug problem.  But in terms of understanding crime and offending and criminal justices responses to it our understanding is very limited and from a democratic or accountable perspective huge resources go into this area and have always gone into the area.  There’s almost never been any sort of cutback on spending on law and order but there’s very little understanding of how that money is actually spent in practice so that is a very important issue.Participant 2: And are you saying there isn’t a culture of ... in my dealing with the Gardaí there was a cultural issue about giving information, the guards are very closed and compared to many other societies, I include military dictatorships.Johnny:  Yeah.Participant 2: Very secretive.Johnny: Yeah.Participant 2: So you’re saying that the lack of information from your point of view is not a cultural issue?Johnny: I didn’t say that but the culture, there is of course a cultural issue and policing studies have shown a very inherent conservatism and a great wariness of potential criticism etc.  Now what we’ve had here up until very recently, up until about the mid 2000s, was that the guards would never give any information on say things like seizures, drug seizures, or things like that in the local area until the Garda Commissioner’s Report was published.  Now the Garda Commissioner’s Report was usually about 2 years out of day so it was of no use in terms of understanding what was going on locally.  I was involved in setting up a community policing system in the north inner city in 2000 with the late Tony Gregory and local guards in Store Street and it’s still functioning very effectively.  But it was I think January 2000 when a member of the local Garda Drugs Unit stood up and he explained to the local people, about 300 local people, the number of seizures that had been made in the last 3 months in the area.  Now I was flabbergasted at the time because that was something that had never been done before.  Now it didn’t tell them a huge amount they didn’t know anyway because they live there but I think what the Gardaí didn’t realise was the importance in terms of communicating to people of just showing them that you’re actually doing something rather than just saying it but showing that you ... and it is a form of accountability.  I think what you could probably say is, and this isn’t only just institutions like the Gardaí, there has never really been accountability in that sense here in any of the institutions that have sort of formed the identity of the State and that is something that I think is now breaking down.  Clearly it is breaking down and people are demanding it.  But I think that probably is part of the picture. Now in terms of our debates about drug related crime and drug crime and all of these various things I think one thing that has often been missing is a perspective on those who are most affected by drug related crime.  The drug problem has always disproportionately impacted on the most vulnerable communities in the sense that they are already suffering numerous aspects of socio and economic problems – low education levels, early school leaving, high levels of unemployment, etc.  And they are also the greatest victims in terms of drug offending.  There isn’t this romantic idea that people in certain areas go out to other areas and rob from other areas and that is one of the things I think that really led to the huge marches that emerged in inner city Dublin in the 1980s and the 1990s was that heroin changed the complexion of crime in a lot of these areas because people were now robbing on their own people whereas traditionally there had been a sense of well you don’t rob on your own.  But the drug problem it completely undermined that whole romantic notion and I think that is a perspective that responses have to look at it.  For example, one of the major issues at the moment I believe – and this was sort of a picture of how communities responded at that time, you know, having marches, marching on Government Buildings, setting up vigils out on the street to stop people dealing, marching on people’s houses who they alleged were drug dealers and evicting them from their houses and on one occasion killing somebody who was an alleged dealer – and that’s the whole aspect of vigilantism as well, there is that potential but what it did show was a serious crisis where a lot of communities felt we’re not noticed and our problems are not addressed.  And I think there is a sense that their problems, as the saying goes, they were over policed but they were under protected in that their priorities, their crime priorities, were not really being reflected in what was happening and what the criminal justice system was doing.  After Veronica Guerin the State response was to symbolically assert itself, that we are winning the war on drugs.  The Criminal Assets Bureau was something that was quite original and was something that has been followed up in many other countries and a range of new drug laws were introduced in the wake of that, of Veronica Guerin’s killing.  But again communities were asking when you actually look at the legislation in practice are our priorities actually being reflected in the policing process?  And the police initiative I mentioned there earlier, in 2000, was the first time that you really had a sort of form of local democratic accountability in Store Street which is still going on. Subsequently now since 2005 there has been the Garda Act, this is quite an ambitious poster of the Labour Party in 1997, yeah the 1997 elections, “1992 drug barons reign, 1997 drug barons run”.  Now there’s a number of reasons why they might have run, one reason is that the source of drugs are not in Ireland they are often in Spain or they’re in Portugal or they’re in the Netherlands so there’s a logical reason to move.  Now recently I believe as a consequence of the organised crime legislation that is something that seems to be causing some concern and also the ability to use different forms of evidence, particularly photographic evidence and telecommunication evidence in prosecutions, is something that is apparently causing some concern.  But drug markets have changed as well, they’ve become more hidden and, as I said, the mobile phones facilitated this.   They become more credit based where people are giving drugs on tick or on credit, more mobile, but they become more violent.  A lot of research has shown that.  And they become much younger, much younger people being involved and much younger people being brought in to keep a look-out, to hold on to drugs, to run drugs between various people but being brought into the enterprise at a much younger age and some say that is one of the reasons it has also become more violent.  And where people to get debts of very small amounts of money are prepared to use levels of violence that historically only 10 years ago you wouldn’t have seen in the Irish drug scene. And some of the issues that are there of course that need to be addressed, one of the major issues I think that hasn’t really sort of got national headlines as of yet I think is the issue of intimidation and violence.  Drug related intimidation of not just users but their families in response to drug debts and economically as the market decreases people’s determination to recoup their debts becomes much more heightened and there have been some studies done by the Family Support Network and by Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign which has been trying to put some sort of focus onto this really serious issue.  But again I think the fact that it isn’t really in the mainstream yet shows you the way in which the drug related crime problem how it’s prioritised.  This, I think, is the main priority for a lot of communities around the city, addressing the issue of intimidation, but it’s not really on the national thing.  There’s an article at the back I wrote there in our journal Drugnet Ireland, which you can get your hands on, where I’ve written up on a recent conference which looked specifically at this issue of intimidation. No-go areas, community stigma, the development of gangs, particularly the involvement of young people and the emergence of sort of gangs around drugs, fear of reprisal which is a major issue in terms of the State, and the drugs strategy, a lot of it is based on local drug taskforces requiring people in local communities to work with the organs of the State to address the various problems but fear of reprisal and the fear of seeing to be associated with responses of the State breaks down that cooperation or that willingness to cooperate and there’s a major democratic problem in relation to that.  So in terms of things like intimidation and drug related crime and fear there is a serious requirement of the State, if it wants to sustain some sort of policy response, it has to address issues of intimidation. Okay, I’m going to move on and conclude.  I think one of the things we have to question in terms of responses is on whose response is the behalf being made and how do we prioritise this issue?  First looking at it, analysing it and then prioritising, what is the important thing to start with because you do have to prioritise.  You can get a copy of this presentation.  I just want to just finish with this slide.  Some of the debates of course doing the rounds of course are like legalisation of drugs and some argue that will take the market from underneath the gangs and the dealers, decriminalisation where you introduce different sanctions.  Portugal is the first country certainly in Europe if not in the world to decriminalise all drugs and so people are now sent to a form of sort of committee that deals with issues of treatment etc., but they are taken completely out of the criminal justice system.  De-penalisation where you don’t send people to prison if they have a health problem, that’s what you address, you don’t incarcerate them as a consequence.  The Dutch solution which has virtually legalised the consumption of drugs in regulated conditions in what they called ‘Coffee Houses’ but a very interesting solution in that in the Netherlands the front door is legal but the back door is illegal, as they say.  The supply of drugs to the coffee house remains illegal but the consumption of drugs in the coffee house is legal.  So this is a sort of a form of, you know, and then you’ve things like community-based mediation, problem solving, local community policing, etc.  I’m going to finish on that.  So feel free to question or comment about it. Participant 3: What’s the data from the Portuguese solution and the Dutch solution?  Is it helping?Johnny: Yes, I think the data is generally fairly positive.  There’s a few articles have been written about that.  Say the Portuguese situation first in that there has been no increase in drug use, that’s one thing.  There has been no increase in drug related deaths which is a very important indicator.  And the Netherlands has shown a consistent decrease in drug related deaths.  Because what the Dutch were doing, and this was as early as 1966, was it wasn’t about legalising drugs, that wasn’t their interest, their interest was about separating markets so separating the cannabis market from more serious drug markets and that is something that they have succeeded in doing.  Now they’re under a lot of pressure.  One of the problems at the moment is because of the much higher purity of cannabis and in the Netherlands in particular and that’s a concern that a lot of other countries would have.  A problem for the Dutch of course is they’ve come under huge pressure from other European countries to reverse their approach and they seem to be yielding to that pressure and there’s some internal pressure as well, there is some political division.  Now as far as I’m aware there’s no political party in the Netherlands that wants to reverse that general approach but what they’re talking about doing is making them only accessible to Dutch people, for example, so that they’re not a tourist attraction for non-Dutch people.  So those are the sort of issues.  The Portuguese process I’ve read everything that’s been written about that and that also seems to be a very ... and I’ve seen them actually working and it seems to be a really interesting process.  Now one of the problems associated with this and like it’s about 10 years now in operation is the message it gives out to young people and this is often a very difficult thing to address, does that mean drugs are okay and that is something that they’re sort of looking at at the moment.  And it’s a very difficult one to square, how do you actually ... because you don’t know what message the more deterrent or prohibitive approach is giving, what message is that giving?  But the more liberal approach that is also giving a message that needs to be considered and I think also the coffee shop phenomenon is a very interesting concept that I think challenges anybody who calls for a liberalisation of drug laws because one of the concerns about that here was that a lot of people could avail of drugs in these coffee shops that mirrored, for example, cocaine, mephedrone.  But many people started using mind altering substances who would never have done otherwise except alcohol so they would never have experimented with substances like that but the fact that you could go into the city centre and go into a main street and go in and buy your drugs and go into the night club next door it did give a message to people that that’s okay and that was a major issue.  Now they’ve been pretty much all closed down but I think anyone in a free market economy who argues for legalisation must also confront the fact that people will then sell aggressively.  They will sell aggressively.  Look at alcohol, you know,alco-pops, people are making profit and there’s huge amounts of profit to be made.  Of course there’s massive profits in an illicit market but there’s also massive profits in an illicit market.  Like one of the things about the head shop phenomenon was the amount of money that was seized.  Like, for example, there was one burned out in Capel Street and they seized I think it was half a million from that shop and if you observed them there was a huge trade so there’s a lot of money to be made and this is a free market economy so ... and there will be aggressive advertising and so people who argue for a more liberal approach have to look at that.  Now that is not to say that those arguments aren’t valid but people come often from a harm reduction approach and they’re saying that the current system isn’t working because people are generally ignoring it and so the harms of their use is hidden so we have to try and bring it more out to the open so we can address these harms.  Another argument about the coffee shops was that once you made them illegal all the substances would simply be transferred into the illicit market.  I don’t think that has really happened.  Mephedrone I’d say it is very likely it has happened but a lot of other substances seem to disappear.  And then of course there’s the reality that people are getting drugs over the Internet so how do you challenge that?  How do you legislate for the Internet?Participant 4: Just around the thing around the inelasticity of heroin in particular and it’s kind of counter intuitive to think that it would be elastic because it’s like the archetypal drug of addiction and people are very dependent on it but interestingly about this time last year or a little bit later there was a good 6 month drought of the availability of street heroin and it just became unavailable really, now that threw up its own consequences like people getting ripped off buying stuff that just wasn’t heroin and whatever heroin was around became very, very pricey but one of the things I would have expected and you heard anecdotal evidence of it happening but it didn’t come across in the statistics that people hammered treatment centres then, the people that would have been addicted to street heroin then all of a sudden would have gone to their local treatment centre but the statistics at the treatment centres didn’t reflect that so.Johnny: And they’d be going there for Methadone, yeah?Participant 4: Yeah.  So I don’t know what that was about, maybe some of it is to do with some heroin use being discretionary, maybe people using heroin on top of their methadone maintenance and using heroin on dole day or when they’ve had a few bob extra, you know.Johnny: Yeah.Participant 4: And then that discretionary use went out and it might have diverted into other drugs, you know, if you like benzodiazepines and things like that.Johnny: That’s what I was just thinking that it’s probably I would say I mean that drought they say was because of a drought in Afghanistan, the crop being affected in Afghanistan how that then rebounded here, but that I would see it as the polydrug issue, that was very interesting, there was a study done in the south inner city called A Dizzying Array of Substances which showed how in a very small ... and often people there’s a perception sometimes that you’ve got a heroin market and you’ve a cannabis market and never the twain shall meet but I think you know yourself better than I do that that’s not the case and so it is probably that people were moving maybe for a similar hit or something similar but it’s an interesting like factor, did that increase the number of people seeking methadone?  People who were happy to use heroin and weren’t interested in methadone.Participant 4: You would imagine there would have been a spike and there wasn’t in the statistics according to the treatment centres.Johnny: Yeah.  Have those statistics been published yet, have they?Participant 4: Yeah, for that time period it must have been about 8 months ago now or 10 months.Johnny: Okay, yeah.  It would be very interesting to check it out.Participant 5: Johnny hiya.Johnny: Hiya.Participant 5: You mentioned about the drugs taskforces earlier and I know that a lot of the funding was cut very recently and most of their funding I think would have been cut in most of the organisations and I wonder is there any statistics or data out there yet about the impact that’s having on communities?  I mean I’ve read anecdotal stuff but I don’t know if there’s anything ... is it too early even to say?Johnny: Well you see there’s a guy, is it Harvey, I know his second name is Harvey, who has written a lot on this, on the actual social infrastructure of communities or the social capital as Putnam would put it and how those taskforces and all of the voluntary work around those taskforces is so important for those communities and so that tiny amount of money that they’ve cut back the effect that has, it has a multiple corrosive impact.  Now he’s the only one I’m aware who has really written about that so far but in terms of other like data has that ... I don’t know, I think that would require that type of sociological analysis that he applies.  And the thing is that it’s probably the most well spent money is money spent at that local level.Participant 6: In your recent research is there much evidence of crystal meth use?Johnny: No, there was a lot of fear of crystal meth and crystal meth was something ... like in a European context the main area, or main country, is the Czech Republic and I think Norway or Sweden were sort of standout countries in terms of crystal meth.  The UK has had a big problem with it as well but there was a concern about 2 years ago that because it was sort of emerging in the UK that the guards felt there’s an 18 month transfer period but UK have had crystal meth problems since the 80s and it’s never really taken off as a big problem here.  Now there have been a number of seizures but it hasn’t seemed to have taken off and any research I have done it’s been talked about and mentioned but nothing like say crack cocaine has been mentioned and there we’ve seen since it emerged really in 2005 it is now available certainly in all taskforce areas around Dublin and it is a market that is a very stable market and a very lucrative market.  Like while prices have fluctuated in other drugs crack is something that has been very steady and very lucrative because people are, you know, there’s such a demand for it, such a repeat demand.  But in terms of crystal meth and it’s also probably more concealed, you know, if you can call it a market because it can produce it in their home.  Like I remember watching a video once where the only way police seized crystal meth was when houses blew up because of the mixture of chemicals and so it might be something that is concealed possibly within certain ethnic groups who have a cultural background of using crystal meth but I don’t think it has transferred across to mainstream Irish society.Participant 7 Yeah, I was just wondering and it’s the same as you were talking about just now, I’ve read in the media about this new phenomenon in the UK that they label it as bath substance but ...Johnny: Bath salts, yeah.Participant 7: ... yeah, yeah has that reached Ireland already because it’s a very strong substance?Participant 4: Been and gone.Johnny: It’s been and ... yeah, it’s been and gone in that like the substances in what were referred to as head shops were nearly always marketed as something else like bath salts and things like that so that’s how the head shops were sort of getting around it.  Now the new legislation that was passed in 2010 prohibits that so now most head shops – and I think there’s about 10 of them out of whatever there was 80 or 90 or more are remaining open and that’s largely because of that new legislation that was introduced, the Psychotropic Substances Act, 2010.  We’ll just take one final quick one there.Participant 8: Just very quickly, are you optimistic or pessimistic for the future?Johnny: Optimistic.  (laughs)Participant 8: In relation to drugs?  (laughter)Johnny: I think one issue that I’ve mentioned that I think is really an important one is the issue of intimidation because that is really breaking down families in ways that mainstream society and the government doesn’t seem to really appreciate yet.  And I think there really needs to be a concerted response to that because once that is allowed and particularly if  the whole concept of gangs and territorial control is allowed to develop well then it’ll turn a corner and it will really be very difficult to come back.  I mean there was a study done recently in Limerick called Understanding Limerick and it showed the way in certain parts of Limerick and it was a very organised destruction of a community to facilitate drug dealing.  And there was a very sort of conscious disintegration of areas to assert control by people involved in the drugs trade and I think if that’s not grasped, you know, we have a sort of a ... I think we can see what can happen and if that isn’t grasped and I think the issue of intimidation is something that really has the potential to, you know, where you have people coming together in the past in large groups and sitting in meeting rooms like the photographs I’ve shown you, it’s very difficult to get that because people are so fearful but I think without that, without that willingness of people to come together and to address it the State can’t address it on its own, they certainly can’t.  So that would be ... I wouldn’t be optimistic unless that is addressed.Facilitator: So I’d just like to say thank you very much for coming along and thank you very much to Johnny for giving the talk.Johnny: You’re very welcome.  Okay.  (clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to Declan Burke's talk and reading.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode Declan Burke, crime author and journalist, reads from his novel 'Absolute Zero Cool', and explains how he had come to write the book. Recorded in front of a live audience at the Central Library in September 2011 as part of its 'Crime and the City' series.Thanks everyone for coming along, particularly on a sunny ... we don’t get so many sunny days these days so I’m sure you all have better things to be doing maybe on a Thursday afternoon, so delighted to see you here.  Padraic, when he contacted me, suggested that I would do a reading for 25 minutes/half an hour from the book and then kind of get involved maybe in a question and answer session which gives me the creeping horrors to be honest because I hate reading aloud, particularly my own work, but I just find it makes for a sterile kind of environment so there’s various sections I was going to read and maybe if people were interested after each section perhaps, because they’re relatively short, maybe then engaging if anyone had any questions I’d be much more comfortable and I think it would possibly be more enjoyable for people if everyone is happy with that.  I suppose the second thing to say then is the framework of the series is ‘Crime in the City’ and ‘Drugs in the City’ is that the title?Padraic: Crime and Drugs.Declan: Crime and Drugs.  And when Padraic contacted me I was going oh I don’t think my book is really appropriate for that because it’s actually about two guys trying to blow up a hospital so there isn’t an awful lot of drug related crime in it.  Except then (laughs) I started going through it and that’s the first half of the book alone, the drug related sections not just references, so I don’t know if that says more about me or the culture that we live in but I’m taking the ‘Drug in the City’ idea relatively broadly in that in my mind drugs or, you know, cigarettes and alcohol are equally as dangerous in the wrong hands as heroine and cannabis and what have you.  So it’s in that context I’m going to read the various sections and, as I say, they’re relatively short and hopefully after each one we might have a short Q&A session if there’s anyone still left in the room. The context of the book I suppose I should explain.  I had written the first draft of this book about 6 or 7 years ago and I sent it to my agent at the time and he read it and he came back to me and said I really, really don’t know what I can do with this.  It was quite dark.  It was about a psychopathic hospital porter who had a sideline in euthanasia and that was one of his penchants.  So I put it in the drawer and I actually ended up writing more kind of comedy related crime fiction.  About 3½ years ago then was just about to have our first baby and at the time I thought I was ready for this but to give you some idea of how unready I was for fatherhood the big sacrifice I was prepared to make at the time was that for a whole 6 months I wouldn’t do any writing just to be there to lend a hand or at least look useful and so forth.  That lasted about 3 weeks because I think if you’re involved in writing it does become a bit of a reverse drug and the compromise I came to with Aileen was that I wouldn’t write anything new because that does take a huge amount of energy, not so much physical but psychic energy, and I would redraft something older.  And 2 days later, literally 2 days later, I was standing at the window of the office looking out onto the back garden which is an essential part of the creative process I think any writer will tell you and it was if the character, the psychopathic hospital porter, his name is Karlsson, as if he had popped into the back garden and said what about me in effect, he didn’t refer to the fact that we had just had a baby but what he ... I mean the line in book is “publish or I’m damned” is what he says.  You’ve created me but I only have a half life and I’m living in this kind of purgatory, you need to redraft me, you need to make me a more likeable psychopath and, you know, make me come alive in effect.  And I thought it was a neat idea.  It made me laugh at the time and if an idea makes me laugh it’s usually a good sign for me to kind of carry on with the idea.  And the idea was that, yes, I would redraft the book and I’d try and make him a more likeable psychopath and for his part in order to grab the attention of the publishers he would plough ahead and blow up the hospital where he works.  So that’s the scenario, that’s the opening section and the book then alternates with sections from the old first draft with Karlsson and the unnamed author then talking about the piece that they’ve just read, they’ve just rewritten and the reactions to it.  So this is the first page of the old draft:The cancer counsellor waves a rolled up a newspaper to shoo us away from the windows so his clients won’t have to watch us smoking.  We are the bolted horses.  Some of my co-smokers drift away around the corner to where a breeze whips beneath a glass corridor connecting the hospital’s old and new buildings.  There they huddle together, shivering.  It’s a grey December day, sleet is battering the glass, the wind, cool easterly.  The cancer counsellor raps on the windows, jerks his head and thumb.  I flip him the bird.  He opens the window and leans out, beckons me across.  I stroll over.  When I’m close enough he mimes writing down the name on my plastic tag.  “Let me get this straight,” I say “you’re miming a disciplinary action”.  This provokes him into taking out a pen, writing my name on the back of his hand.  “You’re on report Karlsson.” he says “Ingrate” I say “If we didn’t smoke you’d be out of a job”, his face reddens.  He doesn’t like being reminded of his role as a parasite, not many do.  “Between you and me” I say “stress is the big killer”.  He’s fuming as he closes the window.  I try to make the connection between a patient’s cancer and my smoking but it can’t be done, there’s a fuzzy blurring of divisions, okay, and carcinogens, either side of the wire but I’m not finding the tangent point.  My line for today comes from Henry G. Strauss, I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified about what he had read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.So that’s section one and obviously cigarettes are the drug of choice in that particular one.  Just a tangent, I didn’t mean to talk about this, but cannabis as a gateway drug is often laughed off particularly by people who use cannabis but I suppose I’m living testimony the fact that it is because I was a virulent anti-smoker before I went to college and dabbled a little in first year with – and I think as you’re supposed to do, almost obliged to do in college – and smoking cannabis didn’t last but I’m still smoking cigarettes, smoking about 40 a day 25 years later.  If cannabis isn’t the gateway drug to cigarettes at least I don’t know what is.  So yeah that’s the first section, that’s the first section of Karlsson’s original draft or the original draft of Karlsson I should say.  If I anybody has any comments to make or wants to leave I’ll look away in the corner so it won’t be too embarrassing for anybody.  We’ll plough on to page 56 then.  And at this point things are not entirely running smoothly.  Karlsson isn’t getting all his own way because the writer obviously believes that he should be the one to shape the narrative and tell Karlsson what he is and what he isn’t going to do.  Karlsson, by the way, has abandoned the name Karlsson and his calling himself Billy because he believes it’s just a nicer name to be known by and, you know, it’s all part of his reformed psychopath role.  But the writer then is being slightly intimidated by interacting with this psychopath.  Now the writer, I should say the author, isn’t demented, isn’t deluded, he actually is based in a writer’s residence, an artist’s retreat, and he has been approached by this guy calling himself Billy who wants to bring the character of Karlsson to life and because he’s in a artist’s retreat the author believes that the character calling himself Billy is actually kind of an avant-garde actor who want so to bring this unpublished character to the stage as soon kind of metafictional comment on life-meets-art-meets-life-meets-art possibly, I don’t know.  So that’s the general context so the author of the book isn’t sitting having coffee with some fictional character that he brought to life but he does believe he’s dealing with a flesh and blood person.  So at this point Billy, being flesh and blood, has offered to chip in and write some of the sections himself, not just rewrite but write because once you start toying with any aspects of a redraft I don’t know how many times I’ve said to myself I’ll just give this one last polish, just one last ... take out the comment ... and, you know, within a week you’re up to your ankles in broken sentences and the whole thing has fallen apart so it never works out.  So in making Karlsson a nicer psychopath that automatically affects every other aspect of the book and we’ve got to the point now where Billy/Karlsson is now writing sections of the book himself and here he is writing about two of his fellow hospital porters, they work in the security department of the hospital, one of them is called Tomo and the other one is called Austin.Tomo says “kill your babies”.  To be precise he croaks this through a lungful of exhaled smoke.  Tomo is into the late afternoon of a wake-n-bake, horizontal on the couch, the drapes pulled.  Killer Tomo twiddles his controller sending his POV avatar roaming through the airport on the TV blasting away at enemy soldiers and cowering civilians alike.  I advance into the apartment until I enter his field of vision.  He pauses the game, smiles up at me sloppily.  “Hey K, how she hanging?”.  He offers a hit off his joint.  I decline.  “Word to the wise” Tomo I say “Frankie was looking for you all morning”.  “Kill your Frankies”, “No really, he was seriously pissed, he had to watch the monitors himself there was no relief cover, Austin rang in sick too, Frankie was up and down the stairs all day”.  “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out”.  “I’m just letting you know Tomo he was seriously pissed”.  Tomo frowns, he struggles into a half sitting position, “K” he says “who the fuck let you in?”, “Austin” I say, I jerk a thumb at Austin who was sitting in the armchair nearest the TV sucking on a hookah, Austin gives a thumbs up then exhales and subsides into the armchair bong tube a dangle.  “Yeah well” Tomo says “now you’re here shut the fuck up about Frankie, take a hit or take a hike, but go easy” he says “it’s pure Thai”.  He takes a deep draw on the joint beckons me closer, I understand he is offering a blow back so as to ease me in gently.  I kneel down as he sits forward until our lips are almost touching then he exhales into my open mouth.  “You might want to ring in sick for tomorrow before you start in proper” he says, “Trust me it’ll be too much hassle after the first draw”.  Tomo sounds far too lucid for this to be true but the smoke floods my lungs as if they were those of an infant, new and pure.  Though smooth going down the blowback causes my brain to pulse like a mushroom cloud.  The effect is one of immediate bliss swiftly followed by gut sucking paranoia then a wonderfully mellow sense of sensory disorientation.  Acute dehydration ensues.  I go to the kitchen for water. I come back from the kitchen thirsty having somehow failed to locate either sink or fridge.  Austin appears to be comatosed in the armchair.  Tomo says something about how every language ever invented has been a failed attempt to discover a means of expression by which mankind might communicate the full extent of its ignorance.  He says kill your babies is a metaphor for eradicating metaphors.  He says it’s an irony rather than a tragedy that most people experience their lives as metaphors for how they would have preferred their lives to be.  He says the real tragedy is that most people already know this.  Tomo says a lot of things but I’m not really listening.  Irony isn’t half as clever when you’re thirsty.  People, you can carve this one in stone, you will seek in vain for irony in the vicinity of a cacti patch.So that’s the second section.  And what follows on from that is that having set up Tomo and Austin as pretty serious cannabis abusers and they are missing work as a result it means that Billy in redrafting the book can then go ahead and he now has an excuse to have them sacked from the hospital because he no longer needs them as characters in his version of his story which is where we start getting into the fact that there are kind of frames within frames within frames of the story, we have the author telling you about Billy who is telling you about the likes of Tomo and Austin etc., all of which of course is between the covers of a book by someone called Declan Burke.  The unnamed author in the book by the way I should say is unnamed obviously but he has published the likes of The Big O and Eight-Ball Boogie, for example, in the past which are books that I have published myself.   So that’s section two.Participant 1: I’d like to know what you feel as a writer you gain by essentially technically you’ve shifted POV, I mean you know that Billy isn’t really a character and so forth so you’ve invented this for POV, what do you feel you’ve gained by making it as elaborate as you have?Declan: That’s a very good question and it’s quite a personal question, believe it or not.  But I’ll answer it. I will answer it.  When I wrote the first version, the first draft, I had split up from a very major relationship in my life and it was quite a dark time in my life, as they say on Oprah, and I used the experience of writing, I purged a lot of black stuff from my life, a lot of poison, went on to the page, a very, very useful exercise in catharsis for me personally, but when my agent read the book he just goes “I really don’t know what I could do with this, this is incredibly ...” you know, usually he would go through a book making notes as he goes along and very good he is at it too.Participant 1: This is Jonathan yeah?Declan: Jonathan Williams that’s right.  A lovely man.  And he gave up about a third of the way through and he said “There’s no point in me making notes about this because I know I’m not going to sell it” (laughs) and that was fair comment, absolutely.  So to answer the question when I came back to it given that where I was in my life then I was at that stage happily married to the person I had split up from and subsequently wrote the book and we had a lovely baby girl so things were completely different and that’s where I think the character of Billy and the idea of a reformed sociopath came from and by using the kind of frame within a frame within a frame kind of scenario and I hope I’m not making it sound as if it’s complex, it’s actually pretty straightforward on the page when you’re reading it, it’s very clear as to what stage you’re at at all times, but it allowed me to differentiate between Karlsson, for example, is the sociopath, the dark stuff, the black stuff belongs to Karlsson.  Billy is the intermediary then between me and Karlsson and it’s as if I’ve put this buffer of distancing an almost ironic distancing to say that I’m not responsible, Declan Burke who is married to Aileen, as the father of Lily, is not responsible for some stuff that’s actually quite bleak in this book.  And that was written originally certainly with a sense of irony but if it was taken out of context could be, you know, there’s some virulently right wing fascist material in this book like.  So while I think it’s worth saying in order to kind of, in the sense of kind of throwing up the question so that people can maybe batter them down again I think given that I was or had become a father I definitely wanted to distance myself from the material so that was one of the reasons for ... probably the major reason, the emotional reason, for creating those frames.Participant 1: The way that you structure it, what made you ... were you stuck when you wanted to hold on to some stuff and redo other stuff, were you stuck with the structure or is that a way of inventing, putting a new author in, which is very complex what might have been a crime novel or did it just come to you that that’s the way you’d do it?Declan: It felt very natural to do it.  I wasn’t particularly stuck at any time.  Touch wood I’ve never been actually ... I never really suffered that writers’ block thing.  When the idea came to me it kind of came to fully formed and I could see it, start, beginning and middle, this framework will work.  You know, obviously it took a lot of work and a lot of finessing certainly and there were certain aspects of the original draft that had to come out and there had to be new stuff to write to keep the structure firm the whole way through but, yeah, sometimes, very, very rarely you do get those beautiful ideas that allow you to tell a story that might have been less ... that maybe if it wasn’t working ... I think the story, the original story, worked nobody just was going to read it, that was the bottom line.  So I think in this, once I had that idea and I saw how it would work the whole way through, sometimes you get an idea and you can see well that’s how the first section will work and then I’ll have to get another idea to make the second and the third act will have to fend for itself type of thing, but this one, when I seen it, for me it worked the whole way through so.Participant 1: Thank you.Participant 2: What’s a wake-n-bake?Declan: A wake-n-bake is, apparently and I’ve been told, you just, you don’t even get out of bed, you wake up, you reach over, you skin up and you just get stoned for the whole day.Participant 2: Right.Declan: Yeah.  Not sure where it originating but there’s a book called Dispatches by Michael Herr, I don’t know if anybody has ever come across it?  It’s a wonderful, wonderful piece of war journalism and it’s called Dispatches because he was I think the Washington Post correspondent in Vietnam so it’s a collection of pieces that he wrote, he sent back from Vietnam, and that book starts off with Michael Herr on a wake-n-bake and he’s a superb, superb writer if you haven’t read the book I would heartily recommend it.So that’s cigarettes and cannabis we’ve dealt with, moving on swiftly now to legal drugs, prescription drugs, why people take them and how people get them I suppose is what the next section is dealing with in one respect.  But you’ll know at this stage that Karlsson/Billy is not a conventional thinker so he does tend to go off on tangents so if they are a wee bit too tangential for you I do apologise for that.  So ...Suffering is part of the natural order.  Pain is as essential as birth and decay.  In scientific tests radishes were proven to scream when ripped from the earth.  Can other radishes hear these screams?  Who cares for the agony of radishes?  The idea of stealing drugs came to me when an old lady asked one night if I had anything on the cart that might dull the pain that had her doubled up and speaking so quietly, I could barely hear her words.  “No mam” I said, “I’m sorry” but it sent me thinking.  There was a certain symmetrical nobility in the idea of pilfering drugs to help those who need them most like a Japanese orderly breaking into Red Cross packages to help British POWs.  But that would have been a crassly stupid thing to do.  Certainly I will plead with a nurse on behalf of a patient who appears to be in pain.  I am not animal except in the literal sense.  But even animals know not to defecate on their own doorstep.  Still, the majority of people who are in pain are not in hospital.  Agony cannot always be x-rayed.  Anguish cannot always be pumped out.  A broken heart cannot be splinted.  These people would rather not pay a General Practitioner’s fee in order to obtain a simple prescription to cure an ailment they can diagnose themselves, this is where I, yours truly, Karlsson, comes in.  The joy of theft is the lack of overheads.  I skim from a different hospital storage facility on alternate floors every month.  In this way I don’t allow a pattern to build up.  This is not difficult to achieve, there is no set schedule to subvert.  If the opportunity presents itself, if the nurse’s station is deserted say and I have not targeted that particular facility for some months and I have the means to transport the contraband undetected, I will avail of the opportunity.  Furthermore I do not skim the same merchandise every time.  The range is wide enough to qualify as eclectic, uppers and downers, anything morphine based, the deliciously bewildering pick n mix of antidepressants and the atypicals, these I offload at a competitive rate to P, my connection in town.  P used to deal weed and E to students until he realised the potential of black market script drugs.  Soon he will graduate to heroin, eventually he’ll become a TV salesman.  I call P.  “My mother in law is out of town” I say, this is his idea of code, P is a paranoid who watches too many gritty American cop shows.  He has The Wire running on a perpetual loop.  His mood swings give him emotional whiplash.  He says “Usual place, 10 bells”, he hangs up.  I ring back.  “Remind me”, I say, “where’s the usual place?”, “The usual for fuck’s sake”.  “I go to a lot of places that are usual” I say.  “Strand Hill” he says, “Strand fucking Hill” this is code for Rosses Point, the swanky resort across the bay from Strand Hill.  I like the idea of dealing illicit contraband at the Point.  “Okay,” I say “see you around 10”.  “At 10” he grinds his teeth.  “10 on the fucking dot” he even sounds like he’s sweating.  So I turn up at 20 past just to be cuntish.  When I get in his car he sees hypnotised by the flicker of the lighthouse beam, his complexion is pasty.  “You alright man?” I say “You don’t look so good” but he’s not listening.  “Give me the shit” he says.  I hand it over.  He gives me the money.  He starts babbling about an upcoming skiing holiday in Bulgaria then confuses it with a skiing holiday he took a few years ago in the Italian Alps.  I cut in, make my excuses.  P drives for home seemingly unaware that two distinct arks in time have just intersected.  I smoke a cigarette before I follow him back into town, the last place I want to be is behind a driver who is unaware that he is trapped at a tangent point between then and when.So there be another section.  I’m fascinated, to be honest, about the use of script drugs, about legal drugs, about prescription drugs, I mean how wide spread it is and how dependent people can come to be on prescription drugs through no fault of their own or necessarily their doctor.  But it certainly is ... I would say it’s more prevalent than that of illegal drugs.  We hear all about heroin, we here about cannabis seizures at Dublin airport etc., etc., I don’t know what the statistics are but I would imagine that far more people are addicted to prescription drugs than are to the harder drugs, the class As particularly.  There’s actually a relatively small core of registered addicts in this country that are addicted to the class A drugs, 30,000 as far as I know, which is quite small when you think about all the headlines you see about heroin etc.  And I know that not all heroin addicts, for example, are registered, not by a long shot, but I would imagine if you measured that statistic versus the people who are in regular receipt of prescription drugs I’d say it would be dwarfed and of course that’s not fascinating in its own regard to the facts and figures but it’s the pain, it’s what’s being treated by those prescription drugs that I think is absolutely fascinating and heartbreaking and I would love to see a graph of the last 5 years in this country, for example, to see the usage of prescription drugs providing people most in need of them can still afford their prescription drugs but I would love to see a graph of the usage and how often and how much is being prescribed because, you know, this country is sick, you know, I mean it is sick metaphorically and literally.  You know, the health service, the fact that Billy Karlsson is a hospital porter is incredibly important to the book obviously but it’s incredibly important to me because I think what’s being done to the health system in this country is an absolute disgrace, you know, sometimes I ... the riots in Athens, for example, you know, part of your brain is saying I wish the Greeks would just realise the extent to which they’ve dug their own grave really in terms of their financial scenario and the other half of you is going fair play, you know, because especially in this country we seem to be incredibly passive while ‘the elite’ carry on regardless, you know, and it’s the ordinary people that are suffering and continue to suffer.  And, you know, if we say metaphorically the country is sick what’s the answer?  We close down the hospitals?  I mean that’s almost a Kafkaesque response like, you know.  I was listening to a guy on the radio the other night and he was saying we lived in the year of absurdonomics where ... and I agree with him because one of the economists who actually I think is quite good but he was saying in The Irish Times there 2 weeks ago that the debt forgiveness scenario that’s on the table at the moment could be sorted out if we just throw 5 or 6 billion at the situation and I was going if we just throw 5 or 6 billion at the situation (laughter).  This morning on the news the big news was that France has released 1 billion of seized Libyan assets back to the new ... the interim Government and that’s going to get Libya back on its feet at least in the short term.  1 billion is going to get Libya back on its feet in the short term.  We’re talking about throwing 5 or 6 billion at debt forgiveness.  We live in an absurd time, an absolutely crazy time and I will say, just to go back to the prescription drugs thing, I would love to know what the extent of it and I wouldn’t even necessarily characterise it as abuse of prescription drugs because, you know, there’s a lot of people out there who need it, badly, badly need it and understandably so.  Here endeth the sermon, sorry about that!  (laughter)Participant 3: I think the Irish health service spends about 3 billion a year on drugs.Declan: Right.Participant 3: About that, I think what it is.Declan: Okay.Participant 3: So probably most likely the prescription drugs go in through that 3 or 4 billion.Declan: Okay.Participant 3: And there’s financial profit as well ...Declan: Sure, sure.Participant 3: ... and if you think about the States where it’s quite normal for obviously anecdotally it’s quite normal for office workers to be taking whatever is the latest upper or downer of choice, you know, it was normal for people to be taking Prozac in an office environment so.Declan: Sure.  And variations thereof, yeah.Participant 3: And I think it’s not quite ... maybe it will get worse here.Declan: Yeah well I mean Americans have a reputation for being a Prozac nation, I can’t remember who wrote that book but there was a book with that provocative title and, you know, there’s any variations on Prozac, for example, and I think part of the problem with the Irish health service is that there are non-brand drugs that will be far cheaper than the brand ones and that was an ongoing and it still is an ongoing situation so I think it could be done far more cheaply but essentially, you know, and I don’t want to be too simplistic about it but, for example, they’re threatening now to close down the emergency ward in Tallaght Hospital because it hasn’t come up to ... because it falls down on various aspects of safety and health and safety because they’ve had to strip back their budget because they’re not getting ... meanwhile (laughs) we’re just lobbing billions at these gamblers on the international markets and I don’t know about you but I’m looking over my shoulder at Iceland and looking at what they’re doing and Iceland were the laughing stock of the world 3 years ago.  Who is laughing at the world now, you know?  But again ...Participant 4: Do you explore that passivity that you’re fingering there in your book?Declan: Yeah I do.  It’s an angry book and it’s too angry.  It shouldn’t be.  I mean a work of literature shouldn’t be angry I think.  Yeah absolutely I think that the ... and not just books, I think that ...Participant 4: So we’ve just wiped off Beckett and a huge number of people who were angry?Declan: Well I think that the artist can be angry but I think that, you know, the great artists have the wit which I don’t have (laughs), have the wit to distance themselves from their material because if what you’re reading is ... I mean anger is a real unformed emotion, you know, it’s raw and it tends to explode and it tends to go off and a lot of people tend to get hurt in the fallout.  You know, quiet and cold rage I think would be more appropriate for this but, you know, like I’m not ashamed, I’m not embarrassed by the fact that it’s angry, I mean these are times when I think a lot of people are angry, you know.  I’m not criticising the Irish people for being passive because what else do you do?  I mean, you know, you can’t have a one person march up O’Connell Street, you know.  There have been marches, there have been very, very rare marches but we don’t want to go the way they did in Athens either and start bombing banks well (laughs) let me rephrase that, we don’t want to go the way they did in Athens and see people killed when they bombed banks.  (laughter)  I certainly don’t.  But if I was to wake up tomorrow morning and hear that a few banks had gone up in flames it would certainly brighten my September I’ll tell you that for nothing.  But yeah I think the book is too angry and I think a great writer doesn’t let emotions cloud the work, that’s my personal opinion.Participant 4: I’m quite hard of hearing ...Declan: Sorry.Participant 4: ... so I’m not hearing everything that you read because I’m not sure the room has T-loop and if it has that it’s on, but I felt that by choosing your kind of character that you chose really below the radar that you kind of defused some of that anger because he’s commenting all the time in a kind of wry way on the situations like how does his smoking effect the patients and that so with my limited hearing I felt that you had managed to sublimate that anger quite well in what you’ve read so far.  So I didn’t have a problem with it.Declan: Okay.  Well, you know, I can only give you my reaction to the book and I’m obviously not the best person to judge.  That said I mean the idea of the hospital porter at one point Karlsson says that one of the huge benefits to being a hospital porter is the fact that you’re so systematically underestimated by the rest of society.  And on two different occasions he’s asked, you know, ‘well what are your plans, like what do you want to be when you grow up?’ in effect. And he’s kind of outraged that the idea of being a hospital porter isn’t enough, that it wouldn’t be regarded as being a function that’s important in society.  Okay he doesn’t get paid enough as ... as much as we’ll say the average bank manager (laughter) but the role he performs in society is far more important, for example, so he believes, but as he says sacrifice is passé in this day and age.  And the fact that society underestimates him is not the reason that he sets out to blow up the hospital but it certainly facilitates his undercover work as he goes about the job, so.Anybody else? Well it looks like we’ll have time for one more section rather than two you’ll be delighted to hear so the last section I was going to read, again we’re back to Karlsson and we’re roughly halfway through the book now and at this stage his plans for blowing up the hospital are fully in train although the reader is not privy nor is the writer (laughs) is not privy to what his plans are either.  But the character that was mentioned in the context of the Tomo and Austin piece, Frankie, who is Tomo and Austin’s supervisor, he was looking for them, so he is the main character here.  Karlsson has gone to ... after work they’ve gone together for a pint.  Previously, a few pages previously, Frankie had agreed to buy a quart of dope from Karlsson.I meet Frankie for a pint after work.  We play some pool in an upstairs pool hall betting on the outcome of each frame, double or nothing each time.  “Frankie man you’re sharking me over here, you’re a fucking hustler, Paul fucking Newman, man”.  Frankie is a big man, muscles are hulking but he’s a surprising delicate touch with a cue, I like him.  Despite his obvious limitations which include a deprived socioeconomic background Frankie is ambitious, he always has a plan.  Frankie wins six games on the bounce.  I concede and shake his hand in the process palming the ounce of dope “Call it quits I say, what do you reckon?”. Frankie is agreeable, he has just scored a couple of weeks worth of low grade bliss, in the process he has implicated himself in the tragic elimination of my superior, should the truth about tampered breaks emerge Frankie cannot take to the witness stand unless it is to confess his gross negligence, he would have to admit to a dereliction of duty in the pursuit of illegal narcotics, behaviour unlikely to impress prospective employers.  We go downstairs.  The pints are on Frankie.  He tells me about his latest plan which is to translate his experience at the hospital into a company that will provide security staff for bars and nightclubs.  The pitch is that the cost of employing Frankie’s well-trained bouncers will be less prohibitive than paying out insurance claims to customers who have been manhandled by delinquent primates.  He has been to the bank, laid out the business plan and all lights are green bar one tiny hitch.  Frankie needs to go back to college.  He needs a piece of paper that says he understands management theory, basic accounting tax laws, etc., ad nauseam.  Frankie’s dilemma is that he can’t afford to take 2 years out to go to college but he can’t afford to not either.  His girlfriend and future life partner, Joanne, is not an especially demanding woman, but Frankie wants to achieve security and respectability on her behalf.  Joanne’s interpretation of security and respectability includes a 3-bed suburban semi, at least one car in the driver and a non-negotiable one fortnight per year in sunnier climes.  Aspirations such as these require cold cash or at least the illusion of cold cash that lending institutions can create.  Thus Frankie’s ambitions are reduced to hard currency, this is the process by which Frankie will be brought to heel, this is how Frankie becomes a meek cog in a machine that despises both meekness and cogs.  “What about you?” he says, “Anything cooking?”. He asked this because the income of a hospital porter isn’t sufficient to qualify as adequate by the modern world’s expectations which appear to be index linked to inflation thus I should be plotting my escape.  It does not occur to him that such a question would be offensive to a hospital porter who believed he was providing an invaluable service to society by taking on a job no one else wants.  Sacrifice is passé.  There is no percentage in martyrdom these days, in the western world at least.  “Not really,” I say, “I’ve enough on my plate working out how to blow up the hospital”.  “Blow it up?” he says.  “Blow it up, close it down, what’s the fucking difference?” he nods, “It’s some fucking dump alright, once I’m gone those fuckers can kiss my hairy hole”.  He sups again frowning.  “You know” he says “I can’t think of anyone who wants to be working there, not one fucking person, you’d only be doing them a favour if you blew it sky high”.  “Apparently a building that size only needs to move four or five feet in any direction, gravity does the rest”, he nods, drains his pint and looks into the glass as he swirls the creamy head around the bottom “Want to go again?” he says.  Cassie has book club tonight so I nod, “My twist” I say.  “Put your money away Frankie, your money is not good here”.  The pints arrive.  I toast him.  “Here’s to going back to college” I say.  “To blowing up the hospital” he says.  We touch glasses and drink deep.That’s that.  That’s probably a good example or a bad example I should say of, you know, it being too angry, you know, the “blow it up, close it down, what’s the fucking difference” I mean that’s clunky, you know, I mean I obviously liked it at the time that’s why it went in (laughs) looking back on it now maybe, hmm, a bit too obvious, a bit too raw, but there you go so.Padraic: We might take a few questions now if people have any?  I have one just to start off.  So far you’ve been published by Lilliput.  Then your second novel you co-published with a smaller publisher, Hag’s Head, then you published your own book on Kindle and now you’ve put out two books through Liberties Press.  Do you think that’s inevitable for a writer now?  And what did you enjoy or what were the upsides and downsides of each?Declan: I don’t think it’s inevitable by any means.  Most writers will have war stories like, for example, I was telling Padraic before we started off that The Big O which was my previous novel it was picked up by Harcourt in the US and they did a terrific job on it, made a beautiful hardback book and 6 weeks before it was due to come out the editor who had signed me up lost her job in a merger between Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin or Harcourt and Dunder Mifflin as a friend of mine refers to them.  And she lost her job and they lost interest in the book The Big O, they published it because the wheels were in motion but, you know, it died a death, they didn’t back it at all.  So those kind of war stories, you know, once you start talking most writers will say ‘oh yeah well wait till I tell you about my editor or my publisher, oh my God’.  So yeah I mean it depends, it differs from writer to writer, some writers will be lucky enough to be picked up from the get-go, signed up to, you know, a 3, 4, 5 book deal and things will progress through the mid list and they’ll become bestsellers and they will live happily ever after.  For most writers I would think because the way the industry is going and particularly because of the impact of e-publishing and Kindle and the Sony Readers etc., that there’s going to be an awful lot more writers I think self publishing and publishing on a very, very small budget so I think you’re going to see a lot more of even the bigger publishers not so much splashing out the 4 or 5 book deals but, you know, taking a ... much in the way that the music industry has gone.  I mean 10 years ago or 15 years ago a band would be taken on by a music label and, you know, given three albums to break into the top 5 or the top 10 or whatever it is and, you know, maybe a couple of top 10 hits on the singles chart, these days in the music industry it’s, you know, if you don’t hit number one with your first record you’re done, you’re dropped, good luck.  It’s becoming the same thing in the books industry, the publishing industry.  And that’s just the way it is, you know, I mean I wouldn’t ... like it’s been a rollercoaster ride, there’s been ups and downs and there’s been some terrific experiences.  The one of publishing ‘The Big O’, co-publishing with Hag’s Head, Hag’s Head Publishing Press is in effect Marsha Swan, it’s a one woman operation and she’s an American lady, she’s living back in the States now.  But it was a wonderful experience because it was 50/50 costs and profits (laughs) ‘profits’ but what it did was it just gave me an insight into the industry really from the grassroots up, literally from putting the first words on the page to write the book to once it was published I was the distribution wing (laughs) of the book, I mean I was literally walking into Waterstones and various book shops with it clutched in my sweaty palms and, you know, ‘Would you please put my book on your shelf’ and quite a lot of the shops did, you know, and the big chains, you know, they were good enough to take a wee punt on it.  We only published 880 copies and it sold out and it eventually got picked up in the States by Harcourt so it had a happy ending of sorts.  So it was hard work and I would much rather to have it being published by one of the big five publishers and then handed a cheque for a million quid and say, you know, go and write another five books but, you know, it doesn’t work that way for 95% of the writers.  As I understand it roughly speaking 5% of published authors pay for the other 95% of writers to get published and when I say 5% we’re talking about the likes of James Patterson and J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown, the writers that come in for a lot of flak for being not marvellous writers in effect by the critics and particularly ... if it wasn’t for these people writing the kind of books and publishing the kind of books they do there’d be very, very few books on your book shelves and on your library shelves these days, you know.  So yeah tough times at the moment but then I don’t think it was ever easy to get a book published and it depends hugely of course on the kind of book that you’re publishing, yeah.Padraic: Then another question, you started the blog when you co-published the second novel and on the first post it’s really clear that it’s a promotional tool for the novel.Declan: Absolutely yeah.Padraic: But in the year since then it’s really taken off, last month you’d 20,000 visits, you’ve interviewed a number of crime writers.Declan: Did I?  (laughter)  Oh wow.Padraic: So how has the blog worked out for you and how has that integrated into things like Green Streets?Declan  The blog worked out terrific.  I’ll just say like we didn’t have a penny to promote The Big O, literally not a red cent, and I had been doing some blogging for another company and I liked the idea of it, I like the immediacy of the publishing thing because I work as a journalist and even when you’re writing, you know, you write a piece, you send it in on a Tuesday, it might pop up in the paper on a Saturday, there’s still a delay I mean of four days and especially in the culture in which we live, this immediate gratification.  So the idea of blogging is quite nice because you write a piece and you blog it and 30 seconds later it’s live to the world which can also be a bad thing (laughs), you know, blog in haste repent at leisure (laughter) as they say.  But it was a promotional tool in part in order ... I mean nobody cared or cared even less than they do about Declan Burke and his novels so in effect what I did was I wanted to talk about ... there was quite a number of ... well I thought there was quite a number of Irish writers, crime writers, coming through writing some very, very good stuff.  People will be very familiar with the name John Connolly, for example, and then perhaps Declan Hughes, Tana French, Juliette Parsons and Colin Bateman.  When I started the blog I thought that, you know, if I got maybe 20 names and kind of piggyback what they were achieving particularly in the States to bring people to the blog so that therefore they would become of my own book and I was absolutely stunned not just by the number of Irish crime writers that were out there but the quality was absolutely fantastic.  I was very, very pleasantly surprised.  Very disappointed originally to find out that Cormac Millar, who is sitting among you, the handsome gentleman in the blue shirt, (laughter) had got there before me and had set up his website all about Irish crime fiction but one of the really nice things about blogging over the last, I don’t know what it is, 4 or 5 years now at this stage, has been that it’s completely the reverse almost of the newspaper industry, for example, where everybody is in immediate competition with one another.  The bloggers and online website people, the community, the blogosphere as they call it, are incredibly helpful and friendly and welcoming and bend over backwards to help you out, whereas instead of kind of protecting our own little patch they’re throwing the ... the land is open to everybody to come and stake their own claim type of thing and there is no staking claims everybody is sharing the kind of same information.  A simple example is I will tell the people who read my blog about Cormac Millar’s book and he will tell people who read his blog about my book as often it’s not the same people that’s reading the two blogs, the two websites.  But there’s a nice ... there’s a lovely kind of crossover with ... there’s a couple of other Irish blogs now but there’s an incredible network and community across the world of various crime fiction/crime writing blogs and websites and that’s been one of the really nice aspects but I have to say I really enjoy doing it but if it hadn’t been for the explosion of quality, particularly in terms of Irish crime writing, then nobody would have come to read the book and the names I’ve mentioned along with those, the likes of Ken Bruen, I think I mentioned Tana French, Arlene Hunt, Jane Casey is a new name coming through, Conor Fitzgerald is a new name coming through, Kevin McCarthy.  Really I could go on, Cormac himself actually, a very fine writer.  I could go on and on.  I would say there’s at least fifty Irish crime writers currently publishing.  Now the quality is not sky high all the time, it can be patchy at times and that’s fine, that’s, you know.  As John Connolly says if I can paraphrase John Connolly he says “95% of crime writing is shit but that’s because 95% of everything is shit” and if we’re lucky we get to read only the 5% so.  If you want to know what to read Cormac Millar, he’s your man.Cormac: ThanksPadraic: So we should open this up to ... is there any more questions?  Does anybody have anything they want to ask about or make a comment?  I’ll keep going otherwise but it’s probably not fair.Participant 5: If there was one thing that keeps you going in writing what would that be, you know, with the novel?  There’s probably more than one.  (laughter)Declan: (laughs) Sometimes it just does come down to just one thing, you know, sometimes you’re hanging by a thread.  I mean I work full-time and I work as a freelancer which is pretty, you know, it’s more time consuming that simply just the 9 to 5 so the days can be long and we have a baby girl so.  I mean I need to get up at 5 in the morning to write from 5 till 7, that’s ... and then the house comes to live at 7 o’clock, if I don’t do it then it doesn’t ... so when the alarm goes off at 4.50 and sometimes you are lying in bed going, what was the ...?  Why did I want to ...?  (laughter) Or I knew there was ... and ultimately when all else falls away as it frequently does (laughs) it’s just words, it’s simply about messing with words, getting the words in the right order.  And there have been days, not many of them, but there have been days when, you know, you’ve spent 2 maybe 3 hours if you’re lucky at the desk and you’ve written one sentence, one sentence, twelve, fifteen, twenty words long but it’s right, it’s good, it works.  (laughs)  That doesn’t sound like an awful lot but, you know, at some stages of writing a book that can be an awful lot, you know.  I mean I think there’s an apocryphal story about Joyce running down one of the Parisian boulevards waving his cane in delight, you know, and asked he’d done a terrific day’s work, he’d written one word but it was the right word.  The right word.  (laughter)  So yeah words in the right order and the best order you can put them, that’s the first reason and I think ultimately it’s why you keep plugging away.  Also because of something like that you didn’t get it right that time so when you start on a new book it’s ‘this time’, ‘this time I’ll get it right’, ‘this time it’ll be ... it won’t be perfect but it’ll be really, really ...’ so this time next year I’ll be sitting here, well hopefully I’ll be sitting here, talking about my new book and how it’s not right and how I’m writing something new that’s going to fix all that and it’ll all be top notch so.Participant 6: Do you start off with an idea in the beginning or do things just come to you and you’ll start off thinking I might write about this and then you went talking about something totally different?  Do you have a kind of rough plan at the start?Declan: Yes, yes and yes.  Sorry?  I didn’t catch that?Participant 6: Do you have a kind of rough plan at the start?Declan:  Oh God I wish I did!  And every time I start off I say this time I’m going to plot, I’m going to be really meticulous, at least I’m going to know what’ll happen in the first, second, third act but the problem is I sit down and I just like tinker around with words and I’ll write down a couple of ideas and off I’ll go.  But yeah it generally starts with an idea.  For example, this one, you know, what if a guy tried to blow up a hospital.  Oh, that’s interesting to me, and you kind of go from there.  As often it’s not for me it’ll be a setting, it’ll be a place, I’ll spot a place, oh that would be a fantastic place to set a scene or given the kind of books I write, that would be a fantastic place to kill a person, wouldn’t that be marvellous (laughter) to hang somebody from that particular ... (laughter).  So yeah an idea, a setting, it could be one line, I mean it could be anything that kind of pops into your head and gives you enough impetus to sit down and write the next line or flesh out that particular place, that setting.  Or just I ... as often as not you think well it’s a really good idea and then you start kind of fleshing it out slightly and then it just falls apart because, you know, maybe it’s a good idea for a short story maybe but not necessary for a novel or whatever.  But that’s one of the things, every time I write a book and this is ... I’ve actually written about nine or ten, I mean I’ve only had four published, but every time I start off I completely forget about how bloody hard it is and how you get the original idea and you charge through the first 20/25/30,000 words and it’s going terrifically and then suddenly you start to, hmm, I should have thought this through a bit more, you know, I should have made out that ground plan as you say but things do occur to you as you go along and that’s one of the joys of it.  That’s one of the flukes, that one thing tends to lead onto another and that’s really one of the ... and you’ve got to the 25,000 word mark and you say well what happens now and it has almost suggested itself to you and then the next 10,000 words are covered and then the next 10,000 words and it’s an evolving process and then you finish the first draft and you go back and you’re oh it’s complete rubbish, how did I think that was any good and you start to rework it and redraft it and more ideas, you know, more things will suggest itself. There was a creative writing teacher, he’s dead now unfortunately, he was fantastic.  He wrote a couple of books.  His name escapes me now I’m afraid but he basically said, you know, you have to trust your imagination and if you write a particular kind of story or write a particular line or whatever it is you may not know why you’ve written it at the time in the context of the piece but when you come back to redraft for example it’ll stand up in like an iceberg out of the story and say well that’s what the story is about, why didn’t I realise that the first time.  And on top of that I should also say that, you know, every writer has their own method, every writer has their own reason for writing and every writer will get across the finishing line in their own way, you know, it’s one of the wonderful things why it makes talking to the writers about books so interesting because there is no single formula, there is no single magic way of doing it, you know.Participant 6:  Yeah.Participant 7: Concerns with the language and so on are, you know, very kind of literary fiction why do you put what you’re doing into crime fiction?  What is the attraction for you about crime fiction?Declan: The attraction for crime fiction, look that’s quite a loaded question (laughter), if we were at a crime fiction convention now you’d probably be hounded out of the room and thrown into a pond to see did you float. Participant 7: Well Graham Greene is a major American writer  ...Declan: Pardon?Participant 7: ... well Graham Greene is a major American writer, much better than Michael Herr for instance.Declan: Well he is, he is.Participant 7: So I mean I don’t think Graham Greene started off with crime fiction but it just ...Declan:  He did.  I think Graham Greene is part of the problem why crime fiction is not taken as seriously, in my opinion, as it should be.  I mean he referred to his crime narratives as his entertainments (laughter) which is a rather dismissive term I would have thought.  And to my mind his entertainments are far more interesting than his more heavy handed theses on whether, you know, God cares about Graham Greene or not but I don’t see absolutely any problem or any ... it’s not a juxtaposition for me, crime fiction and quality of language, I mean I really don’t ... you know I write crime narratives.Participant 7: No sorry could ... my question isn’t to justify why you’re in crime fiction but what the attraction of crime fiction is for you ...Declan: For me?Participant 7: ... rather than make you justify why you’re attracted to it.Declan: The attraction of writing it or of reading it or ...?Participant 7: Yeah, the attraction of doing it, yeah.Declan: Right, well the attraction of when I first set out was that I thought it was easy to do (laughs), that’s what I thought at the time.  I suppose it is easy to do.  I mean it’s easy to do any kind of book, you know, it’s difficult to do a good book but that’s neither here or there.  Crime fiction tends to follow a fairly ... well, you know, it’s a time honoured narrative art, there’s usually three acts, you know, and it’s that whole order/disorder/order generally and it runs all the way back to classical Greek tragedy, for example.  And if it survived 3,500 years then there’s probably not an awful lot wrong with that basic structure.  So once you have that structure that’s fine but that’s just a framework, you know.  It’s what you do with that and for me what crime fiction and implicit in what I’m saying is well written crime fiction, James Lee Burke that you’ve mentioned is a very good example of a guy who really knows his way around a sentence, you know.  Cormac McCarthy, for example, has turned to writing crime narratives.  James Ellroy is superb.  Elmore Leonard in his kind of more conversational vernacular style is to me as good a writer as any of the literary path.  So what crime fiction that, you know, implicitly embodies great writing does is that it tends to broach subjects that are taboo quicker than literary fiction does.  It tends to get to topics sooner.  It tends to be more timely and relevant.  It tends to be an awful lot more exciting than the literary fiction.  Now a lot of crime fiction tends to sacrifice language for example, it tends to sacrifice aspects that literary fiction would hold sacred.  Crime fiction tends to concentrate on plot, character much more than language we’ll say, there’s a different primacy given to each level.  But then, you know, to go back to John Connolly’s 95% of everything is shit to me the great writers, the great crime writers, are on the same par as the great literary writers, past and present, you know.  Like I think Hemingway, for example, I think Raymond Chandler is a Hemingway with a sense of humour so I mean I don’t know if you’ve read Raymond Chandler or not but ...Participant: Yes.Declan:  Hemingway is a wonderful stylist but he’s dry as a bone, you know, you’re not going to ‘oh I’m really in the mood to be entertained now I think I’m going to read some Hemingway’ (laughter) no, you’re not, you’re going to pick up a Chandler, you know, and you’re going to get a really good story, you’re going to get a fascinating insight into a time and a place, you’re going to get a connection between low level criminality and the highest levels of marbled justice and you’re going to giggle at least once a page and that’s not a bad average.Padraic: Okay folks we’re going to have to leave it there.  Thanks very much for coming along and thanks to Declan for coming in and talking to us.Declan: Well thank you everybody for coming along as well.  (clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

There is something very comforting about whodunnits.  Unlike real life, there are never any unsolved mysteries or loose ends; the murderer is properly unmasked, Scooby-Doo fashion, at the end; and the whole thing is a gentle exercise for the old brain cells as we get to play along, working out clues and chasing red herrings. They’re the television equivalent of toast: warm, cosy, and easy to digest. A whole host of detective series is available on DVD in libraries now, including a pretty hefty set of Miss Marple that would make an admirable murder weapon in itself. MorseGood old Morse: the jag, the crosswords, the ale, the classical music, and of course the long-suffering Lewis. Brilliant!  A Touch of Frost D.I. Jack Frost solves crimes the old-fashioned way, while battling with bureaucracy incarnate in the form of his boss, Superintendent Mullet.  Foyle’s WarD.I. Foyle, and his two assistants, Sam and Milner, solve not just the usual murders but also crimes involving profiteering and the black market, relevant to the WWII setting. Great props and costumes, very authentic. Midsomer MurdersThe chocolate-box pretty county  of Midsomer is somewhat overrun with gruesome crime, and by this stage there can’t be many villagers left. Nonetheless, Inspector Barnaby and his various sidekicks manage in each episode to find another body and another murderer.

Dublin is famous for many things, not least its nightlife. While many people imagine that Dublin’s international profile as a night spot only began with the establishment of Temple Bar, this selection of images from the Special Collections of Dublin City Public Libraries demonstrates that the fun didn’t start then. Fairs and taverns provided venues for entertainment from the Middle Ages and in the eighteenth century Coffee Houses were dens of political dissent and gossip. During that same century the theatres often saw more action in the pit than on the stage, or if throwing oranges at the actors was not to your taste you could while away the evening with a trip to a Charity Sermon. During the nineteenth century thrilling melodrama and wild vaudeville graced the Dublin stage and organisations such as the YMCA hosted lectures on the new advances in science. Going to “the pictures” became an important part of a Dublin night out in the twentieth century, but the city also played host to international luminaries such as Laurel and Hardy and The Beatles. And in the Dublin of the early 1980s you could get to a U2 concert for just £1.20!View images from A Great Night Out! image gallery.Further ResourcesThe following online resources can be accessed free of charge at your local library (access links via our NetVibes portal). Ask library staff for information and assistance.Libraries and Archives Digital Repository: Digital records relating to Dublin, including photographs, postcards, letters, maps and ephemeral material. Highlights of the collection include the Fáilte Ireland Photographic Collection, Wide Street Commission Map Collection (1757-1851), the Irish Theatre Archive and the Birth of the Republic Collection, which comprises material from the period of the foundation of the Irish state.Irish Times Digital Archive: This online archive service gives access to contemporary editions of the Irish Times from the mid-nineteenth century until the present.Irish Newspaper Archive: This online archive service gives access to contemporary editions of the Irish Independent and a range of other newspapers.The Ireland-JSTOR Collection: This online archive of academic articles can also be accessed free of charge at your local library.For further reading, consult the Library Catalogue.

Dublin City Libraries plans to digitise some of its early books and manuscripts, in order to bring the history of the city before a wider public. Many of the proposed works are hard to find and are very expensive to buy. The Picture of Dublin 1811 is the first in the series and it is being used as a pilot project to assess the value of the project.

The Commissioners for making Wide and Convenient Ways, Streets and Passages in the City of Dublin was established by an Act of Parliament in 1757. The Commission had extensive powers with the authority to acquire property by compulsory purchase, demolish it, lay down new streets and set lots along the new streets to builders for development.

'Aisy, aisy, mind the chisler’. Brendan Behan, The Confirmation Suit (1953). This gallery consists of images of children going about their business in Dublin from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present day.

'The Jacks Are Back' image gallery celebrates the greatest sports team this city has produced. Up da Dubs! These images were taken from the Dublin City Council Photographic Collection and The Reading Room's extensive collection of GAA match programmes. The images taken from contemporary programmes featured in this gallery are copyright of Cumann Lúthchleas Gael/Gaelic Athletic Association.

Dublin City Public Libraries and Ireland Literature Exchange presented a series of talks and readings, 'Dublin Revealed' in the Central Library in May 2011. Three of these talks and readings are available to listen to here.Right: Paul Murray, Carlo Gébler, Kevin BarryCarlo GéblerBorn in Dublin in 1954, Carlo Gébler was brought up in London and studied at the University of York and the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield. His novels include The Eleventh Summer (1985), Work & Play (1987), Malachy and his Family (1990), Life of a Drum (1991), The Cure (1994), How to Murder a Man (1998) and A Good Day for a Dog (2008). He collaborated with Patrick Maguire to write the 2008 memoir, My Father's Watch: The Story of a Child Prisoner in 70s Britain, imbuing it with a "quiet emotionalism" (The Guardian). His books for children are well-known: Caught on a Train (2001) was short-listed for a Bisto prize. In addition, he has written articles and short stories for many national publications and a libretto for opera. He is a film-maker, producer and director of television documentaries. Carlo’s work has been supported by ILE in Italian and Hebrew. Carlo Gébler is a member of Aosdána and lives in Enniskillen, where he currently is writer-in-residence in HMP Maghaberry. Browse Carlo Gébler books in the library catalogue.Listen Carlo Gébler reading from his new novel The Dead Eight, followed by questions and answers. Introduction by Sinéad Mac Aodha (13th May 2011).Carlo Gébler talk transcript.Kevin BarryKevin Barry was born in Limerick in 1969 and now lives in Sligo. His first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2007. Fellow Irish short story writer Philip Ó Ceallaigh praised them as 'vibrant, original, and intelligent short stories that deserve to be read and reread and to outlast the strange years that made them'. He has written about travel and literature for The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. His debut novel City of Bohane (published last month) is set in 2054 in the fictional city of Bohane in the West of Ireland, which is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. Irvine Welsh has described Barry as ‘the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years’. Check the availability of City of Bohane and There are Little Kingdoms in the catalogue.Listen to Kevin Barry reading from City of Bohane, followed by questions and answers. With an introduction by Aoife Walsh (20th May 2011).Kevin Barry talk transcriptPaul MurrayBorn in Dublin in 1975, Paul Murray studied English Literature in Trinity College. He later completed a postgraduate degree in Creative Writing at East Anglia University. His riotously funny début novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003), was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies (2010) was long-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Neil Jordan is set to direct the film adaptation. Skippy Dies has been supported by ILE in Italian, German and Norwegian. "Skippy Dies is so appealing and surprising that the pages pass with ease", The Guardian. Check the availability of Skippy Dies and An Evening of Long Goodbyes in the catalogue.Listen to Paul Murray reading from Skippy Dies, followed by questions and answers. With an introduction by Paul Murray (27th May 2011).Paul Murray talk transcript. Jennifer JohnstonJennifer Johnston also read and took questions at the Central Library as part of Dublin Revealed on 6th May.Jennifer Johnston (1930) was born in Dublin. She is a novelist and a dramatist, her most recent novel being Truth or Fiction, published in 2009 by Headline Review. Foolish Mortals (2007) was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2010. She has received many awards: the 1979 Whitbread Award for The Old Jest; the Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio play (1989) and Shadows on our Skin (1977) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She was short-listed for the Daily Express Best Book of the Year 1992 for The Invisible Worm. The Irish Independent has called her "one of Ireland's finest writers". With support from ILE, her work has been translated into French, Slovene, Croatian, Czech, Romanian and Bulgarian.  Jennifer Johnston lives in Derry and is a member of Aosdána. Browse Jennifer Johnston books in the library catalogue. Subscribe to literary readings and talks in a reader