Dermot Kinlen:With the death of Mr Justice Dermot Kinlen aged 77, the prison service has lost its fiercest critic and prisoners a staunch champion of their rights. The State's first inspector of prisons, he was an equally consistent critic of the minister for justice and his departmental officials.
In each annual prison report, he was radical, innovative, severely critical and very direct. In one, he said the minister and the Oireachtas "should be ashamed" of St Patrick's Institution for juveniles, which should be "destroyed immediately".
He also criticised politicians who advocated more prison places and harsher regimes. "These are the people who have read, or should have read, report after report, study after study, all showing that you cannot cut reoffending rates, let alone suicides, if you put more and more prisoners into under-staffed jails designed often 100 years or more ago to hold a fraction of their present number." The former High Court judge expressed controversial views about the effectiveness of prisons. "I am not suggesting prisons should be abolished. However. . . I believe prisons on the whole do not work."
He also suggested that a private security company should take over the running of a prison on a trial basis, a recommendation that provoked howls of protest.
A distinguished international jurist, he was also a patron of the arts, undertook many international diplomatic missions for the State, headed an international inquiry team into re-education camps in Vietnam after the war, was an observer at the "Negros Nine" trials in the Philippines and was instrumental in the negotiations for the release of Fr Niall O'Brien.
A member of the board of St Patrick's Institution for Juvenile Offenders from 1971 to 1993, he was chairman of Mountjoy Prison visiting committee from 1990 to 1993, when he was appointed a High Court judge.
He was patron of Pace (Prisoners' Aid through Community Effort) a half-way house for discharged prisoners. He also visited prisons across the globe as part of international monitoring groups. In 1997 he received a papal award as a Knight Commander of Equestrian Order of St Gregory the Great with Cross and liked to tell friends that meant he could receive Holy Communion mounted on a horse. A man of diverse interests, he was also a renowned host and raconteur, a "gregarious and hugely popular man", according to friends.
Born in Dublin in 1930, he graduated from UCD with first class honours in modern Irish and European history. A graduate of King's Inns, he served as a junior counsel in the 1950s on the south western circuit in Limerick, Clare and Kerry, where he first showed his interest in prison conditions.
His maternal grandfather, Tom O'Donnell, was a Circuit Court judge and Nationalist Party MP for Kerry. He maintained his Kerry links with a holiday home in Sneem. A friend on the southwestern circuit described him as a "tourism chief long before the term was invented, because he was such an ambassador for the county".
He took silk in 1971 and as a senior counsel appeared in a number of leading cases including the Whiddy Island disaster inquiry, the Stardust Disaster inquiry and the Wood Quay saga. In 1977 he visited China with former president Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh and was involved in the establishment of diplomatic relations between Ireland and China.
He led groups of barristers to Cuba, where they met Fidel Castro. A friend recalls one occasion: "They were all wearing an Irish sports tie and he had one as a gift for Castro but it went missing. So without hesitation and with éclat and panache he pulled the tie from around his own neck and put it around Castro's."
"His generosity was unrivalled," said another colleague. "He was always inviting people to his homes" and he regularly displayed that generosity when he brought large groups to the opera, which he loved. "You'd be given an individual programme which told you who was sitting either side of you," recalled a friend. "You'd be invited to a reception during one of the breaks and afterwards he hosted huge parties at his home."
Over the last number of years he suffered ill health but "it had no effect on his bubbly personality". On the evening of his death he was hosting a party at his Sneem home when he felt unwell.
He is survived by his brother, Kevin who is retired from business; his sister, Aideen, a Sacred Heart nun and former barrister; his sister-in-law, Deirdre and his four nieces and nephews.
Dermot Kinlen: born April 24th, 1930; died July 18th, 2007.