The Gates Of Hell
The horrific reality of life inside “the Joy” is laid bare in a book by ex-inmate Dan Gwira.
Stuart Clark, 07 Nov 2011
“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.”
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