Family Day In Dublin

Part of the outreach of ICPO, the Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas (whose London office forms part of the Irish Chaplaincy) is supporting families, and I was delighted to be invited to attend the Family Day in Dublin.

It was the first in-person meeting for three years. Indeed it was my first trip over to Ireland since the start of 2020, just before a thing called Covid-19 put an end to things we'd previously taken for granted like travel and meeting up in person. The Family Day had, like many things, been done via zoom but there really is no substitute for being with people in the flesh.

It was a chance as well to stay again with my friend Adrian who lives in Prosperous in Co. Kildare and with whom I'd often stayed whenever I had meetings at Maynooth. I first met Adrian when I was eighteen. He arrived at Sheffield University to do post-graduate studies in Japanese and promptly founded a student SVP (St Vincent de Paul) group at the Catholic Chaplaincy, the SVP having helped his own family when he was growing up in West Belfast. It was my involvement with both the Chaplaincy and the SVP that set me on my path in life. It was great to catch up with Adrian. After a delicious meal we sat in front of a roaring turf fire and sipped wine and spoke of our writing and other projects.

I left a rainy Prosperous in the morning and was on the rocky road to Dublin, to the Ashling Hotel next to Phoenix Park, the venue of previous Family Days. I'm always incredibly touched to meet people who have a loved one in prison. We often say that the family members also serve a kind of sentence, and there are all kinds of difficult feelings that they live with like shame and guilt. This was acknowledged by our excellent morning speaker, Mary from Accord, the marriage care organisation. She spoke of the importance of self-care, looking after oneself, and we all need to be reminded of that sometimes. I could have listened to Mary all day. There was then time to chat with those on our table about any issues. I was sitting next to a lovely woman from Co. Clare whose son is in prison in Devon. "He did something stupid," she explained. I reassured her that each and every one of us in the room had done something stupid in our life but by the grace of God we hadn't ended up in prison because of it. She went on to say that he had been lucky to get enrolled in a workshop each day from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. that repairs old bikes for sale on eBay, and for which he earns £12 a week. He is indeed one of the lucky ones, since many prisons in England and Wales are still enforcing 'bang up' of up to 23 and a half hours per day, partly due to a chronic shortage of prison officers. This young man is lucky as well in that his mother, in spite of the distance and the expense, will be making regular visits to him. It is this maintenance of family contact that has been shown to be the single most significant factor in eventual successful rehabilitation.

One of the mutual pleasures of the Family Day is simply coming together as fellow humans in a congenial environment, and the nice lunch is part of that. It was even better than usual on this occasion. As well as the three-course meal we had impromptu entertainment from the woman who was serving us. While the main course plates were handed out she told some jokes. A bit later she sang 'Molly Malone'. Then as we tucked into our desserts she related a hilarious story about a time she got into a spot of bother on the Paris Metro. As she played with great animation the roles of different characters in the story her colleague was passing by and asked, "Is it the Paris story?" Gerry turned to me and said, "You don't get this in London!" You certainly don't!

I stayed that night in a room at Maynooth that would I suppose have been occupied in former times by someone studying for the priesthood. Inspired by the words of Mary in the morning I decided to exercise a bit of self-care in the evening. I headed to The Roost, a lively bar/restaurant on the Main Street, which is usually filled with students and where I'd been before with the ICPO Maynooth team. I treated myself to a curry and a beer. Plus, it was a Champions League night so I sat back and enjoyed a bit of football on the big screen. I also got into conversation with the woman who'd been serving me. She said she remembered me from before, but maybe she says that to everyone!

The Maynooth seminary has produced more priests that anywhere else in the world but it's a different place now. These days the seminary is in the middle of the bustling campus of St Patrick's University. Gerry pointed out to us that in his 'class of '73' there were eighty-six seminarians. In 2021 that number was down to six. The Columba Centre on the campus was the venue for a meet up between the Maynooth office of ICPO and the London office. Just like on the day before in Dublin it was wonderful to be together once more in the flesh after two and a half years. And just like on the previous day, there was a sumptuous lunch on offer, this time in the grand surroundings of the Pugin Dining-room, one of the contenders apparently for the Hogwarts film-set!

I flew back from Dublin feeling immense gratitude for those couple of days: the encounters, the food, the conversations, the entertainment…

And may we all spare a thought from time to time for all those in prison, so too for their families.

Prisons Week 2022 runs from October 9th - 15th