The Gates Of Hell

“The last time I had my photograph taken was for a mugshot! Unlike then I’m going to smile, ‘cos there was an upside to being in prison as well as a downside.”

Dan Gwira is reflecting on his two stays in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison – the last of which ended on October 28, 2010 ­– for cocaine smuggling.
If there’s such a thing as a typical Irish prison inmate, the 58-year-old isn’t it. Irish-born but English-raised, Dan’s Ghanaian grandfather came to Dublin in 1898, and 18 years later, after studying at Trinity College became Ireland’s first black barrister. Marrying a lady of Dutch-Ghanaian ancestry, his first-born was Dan’s dad who served as Ghana’s Ambassador to a number of countries.
Not wanting to drag his son all over the world and disrupt his education, he sent him to a private boarding school in Taunton, Somerset, from which Dan emerged with French, History, English Literature and Political Science A-Levels.
“Going to boarding school actually made serving my Mountjoy sentences easier because I was used to not having my family and friends around me,” he reflects, “and being told from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed what to do. It was great training for prison!”
I suspect that’s one testimonial which won’t be making it into the school prospectus! If Dan’s early life was unusual, it got positively bizarre after that.
“Following school, I went to New York and studied Martial Arts Education in college,” he resumes. “After graduating, I started teaching in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, all over. These are countries where the drug trade is regarded as a way of life rather than a criminal activity – whole communities rely on it for a living. Anyway, martial arts teaching doesn’t pay that well and I met some people who, because I had an Irish passport and didn’t need a visa, paid me $5,000 to courier four kilos of cocaine from Colombia through Brazil to Amsterdam and then onto Dublin, where I was caught at the airport. These people had concealed the cocaine in some shoes and the lining of a suitcase, but customs found it and in February 1993 I was sentenced to eight years in Mountjoy.”
Given early release in 1998, Dan left The Joy with two bin-bags full of clothes and the address of the Pathways Project, an outreach initiative for ex-prisoners.
“I managed to get 18 hours a week teaching computers there, but then they cut that to 12 hours and again to ten, so I had no money and no prospect of getting a job because I’ve a criminal record. In this country you’re pretty much abandoned when you come out of prison. I never got depressed or felt life was pointless in Mountjoy, but I did when I was released. All those days with nothing to do and nowhere to go – it destroys what little self-worth you have left after having to piss into a pot for five years. The only people I knew in Dublin were the ones I’d been to prison with, which isn’t the company you should be keeping if you’re trying to stay out of trouble. Anyway, it’s a measure of how desperate I was that I went back to South America and tried to smuggle three-and-a-half kilos this time into Ireland.”
In an almost comedic twist, Dan was caught on April 28, 2002 by the same Dublin Airport customs officer who’d rumbled him eight years earlier.
“I was stupid enough to think that maybe they’d forgotten about me,” he resumes, “which obviously they hadn’t. Now if you told me to go I’d say, ‘No, I’ll starve first’, but I just wasn’t thinking straight. I’ve got too many things to do with my life to make the same mistake again.”
It looked like Dan had caught an extremely lucky break when those three-and-a-half kilos mysteriously disappeared from the Garda evidence room, and Judge Desmond Windle struck out the case against him. Two years later though, he was re-arrested and this time sentenced to ten years in The Joy – an experience recounted in Mountjoy Prison “The Untamable Beast”– Reflections Of The Naked Inmate, a book that’s accompanied by two cover-mounted CDs of songs he recorded whilst locked up in his cell.
Both are remarkable for their lack of self-pity – Dan acknowledges that the only person to blame for his time behind bars is himself – and rancour towards his captors. He does, however, have some extremely harsh things to say about the prison itself.
“What you’ve heard about Mountjoy is not nearly as bad as it really is,” he writes in his book. “They never take into account the mental toll that afflicts the inmates or the officers. With chronic alcoholism and all kinds of drug addiction rearing their ugly heads, nobody is the same when he comes out. They should make a video of the real conditions to deter kids.
“Riots, hunger strikes, suicides, drug overdoses, sexual blackmail, rapes, theft, intimidation, fights, stabbings have all at one time or another happened in the prison. Throw in the lice, insects, bedbugs, mice, cockroaches, HIV afflicted inmates, drug abuse, unhygienic conditions, ‘slopping out’, uncured skin diseases, broken needles on the landing floor, blood on the toilet seats, shit parcels blocking the toilets, spit all over the walls, floors and even seats in the recreation area, the smell of faeces and urine in the showers…”
So, not exactly the glorified holiday camp of popular tabloid legend?
“I tell you who’s pleased I’ve written this book – the officers,” Dan claims. “They can’t talk to the media because they’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, so they rely on other people to do it for them. I showed most of the officers what I’d written about them and they were delighted that finally somebody was telling the truth. How can any country that makes its prisoners piss and shit into a pot be regarded as civilised?”
In Mountjoy Prison – “The Untamable Beast”, Dan recounts how former Justice Minister Michael McDowell’s criticism in 2005 of prison wardens badly backfired.
“In protest they went on a work to rule, which meant that if they saw you with a mobile phone or taking drugs they wouldn’t report it because that meant having to fill out loads of paperwork and going to court. Being a prison officer’s a tough fucking job. Some of them were alcoholics – you could smell it on their breath. Others took drugs themselves or ran up gambling debts. They get to go home at nights, but in a way they’re doing their own sentence.”
According to Dan, the going rate for a mobile phone and charger when he was inside was €1,500 with one of the chief suppliers a prison officer who openly touted for business among the inmates.
He doesn’t know how much cocaine, heroin, cannabis and ecstasy were going for on the landings, because despite smuggling drugs, he’s never taken them.
There was much brouhaha in July 2010 when Mountjoy’s new governor Ned Whelan announced a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards drugs – a stance that was somewhat spoiled before Christmas when a warden was arrested on suspicion of trying to smuggle drugs into Mountjoy. One of the questions Hot Press asked Mr. Whelan when he was previously in charge of Wheatfield Prison in Clondalkin was why inmates didn’t have access to condoms.
“As far as I’m concerned there’s no sex in prison,” he insisted. “That sort of physical contact is against the rules.”
Was there sex in Mountjoy while Dan was there?
“Of course there was. If the officers knew that two prisoners were boyfriend and girlfriend – you know, a couple – they’d try and put them in the same cell because that meant less trouble. There was a guy called Wing Bitch who’d do whatever you wanted for a price – he used butter as a lubricant so you could get it in – and loads of people willing to give you a blowjob for drugs or mobile phone credit which is another currency in there. The officers absolutely knew there were prisoners having sex, but never reported it or suggested to anybody that it’d be a good idea if they were supplied with condoms.
“The Minister for Justice doesn’t give a shit about people getting HIV when they’re inside. One of the former governors, John Lonergan, put antiseptic bleach in all the toilets so the junkies sharing syringes could clean them. When the government of the day found out, they put a stop to it because it was seen as condoning drug abuse.
“A friend of mine who I used to play chess with, Brian, died during my first sentence,” he recalls solemnly. “It was horrible to see him deteriorating – his hair fell out and then eventually his mind went. The last place someone susceptible to infection should be is Mountjoy, but they only moved him to an outside prison a few weeks before he died.
“Ned Whelan is okay for the job, but he’s coming in too hard. They found a mobile phone in a baby’s nappy so now prisoners aren’t allowed to cuddle their children. That’s terribly hard for a parent and the sort of thing that triggers riots.”
Education, says Dan, is another area where the prison service has it wrong.
“You get paid €2 a day if you’re in education, or €4.50 if you work in the shops doing whatever menial tasks there are that need doing, Surely it should be the other way around so that people come out of prison with qualifications that might help them get a job?”
One would have thought so, but then again I’m not the Minister for Justice or one of his minions. Dan mentioned earlier the upside to being in prison, which in his case was having unlimited time to write his book and record the 29 songs that accompany it.
“A lot of authors dream about having that sort of peace,” he laughs. “I knew going into jail the second time that I had to have a plan, and the governor and other staff were kind enough to let me have an old computer from the library and musical equipment in my cell. The book and the CDs go together as the lyrics also describe what goes on in Mountjoy and how the prisoners were feeling at the time. No one can pronounce my surname, so for musical purposes I’m The Naked Inmate.”
While currently only available online and from Tower Records, Dan is hopeful of finding a distributor for Mountjoy Prison “The Untamable Beast”– Reflections Of The Naked Inmate and also thinks with the right treatment that it’d make a good film – “possibly a comic one, because some crazy stuff happened in there!” He wrote six other tomes during his incarceration, one of which, A Shortened Version Of The Bible, is being shopped around at the London Book Fair in April.
“Do I regret going to prison?” he reflects. “Yes. Do I regret what I did with my time while I was in there? No. The truth about Mountjoy needed to be told and I’ve done that.”

Mountjoy Prison “The Untamable Beast”– Reflections Of The Naked Inmate is available from Tower Records, Wicklow Street, Dublin 2. See nakedinmate.com for more.