Inside Loughan House: ‘I made the choice that got me here’

This is the second in a special series on Loughan House Open Prison in Blacklion. Reporter Róisín McManus makes another visit to the facility, this time to speak to an inmate about their experience here compared to a high-security prison. David is serving out the remaining years of his sentence in west Cavan...

After first going into custody in 2024, David received a seven-year sentence in 2025 for drug-related offences. He was held on remand between Cloverhill Prison and Wheatfield Prison, and was moved to Mountjoy Prison after receiving his sentence, where he spent several months before he was sent to Loughan House.

On a sunny midweek afternoon, David and a handful of other prisoners are working at a local house. The sound of fleating sheep fills the air as they sweep and hose down the street.

“You kind of have to keep your head down to get here,” David tells this newspaper.

“I believe it’s based on behaviour and character,” he says of decisions made to move prisoners to an open centre.

“Some people just get given a chance.”

Moving from closed prisons to an open prison was an adjustment for David, as it can be for many prisoners.

“Some of them find it a big step because the routine in the closed prison is all they’ve known for the last number of years so the structure is totally different,” explains Assistant Governor Johnny Higgins.

“You’re totally dependent on the prison officer in the closed prison,” Mr Higgins says.

“Your door isn’t open until the prison officer opens it, you’re not allowed to go to school until the school officer collects you, you can’t go to the yard until you’re collected. Whereas here, the door is open and you make your own routine.

“You’re responsible for your own day, and some lads who have become somewhat institutionalised or accustomed to that find the adjustment difficult, and when they come here first, they can often report that they find the day long because they’re not used to being their own master.”

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

David’s time spent in three “very similar” closed prisons affected him “hugely” and have had a lasting impact on him, bringing him “back to the very basics of being a human being”.

“They’re overcrowded, there’s no activity really; you go to school if you’re lucky,” he says of those prisons.

When he was in Mountjoy, he worked in the bakery, which he enjoyed because the days went past “really fast”.

“All those prisons just morph into one. Some of the cells are the same size, the officers all look the same because they’re all wearing the same uniform, and then you come out here and it’s just so different.”

Although his time in closed prisons left a mark on him, David acknowledges that he put himself into that position.

“Someone didn’t take away the privilege,” he says.

“I made the choice that got me there,” he puts simply.

ACCOMMODATION

In Loughan House, David now has his own ensuite room, which puts him in a “one percentile” in the prison system. He shares a bathroom with his neighbour in the adjoining room, who he gets along with “brilliantly”.

There are four buildings for accommodation in Loughan House. The Main House, which is the original building, can occupy up to 80 prisoners in single and shared rooms, and Pine Lodge can occupy up to 60 in single rooms. Spruce Lodge, which is the former governor’s dwellings, houses three prisoners and there are 10 newly-developed independent living modular units for prisoners who are nearing release.

The relative freedom attached to the open centre is something David doesn’t take for granted but he still leaves the door to his room ajar when he is in there.

“You feel like someone’s going to take it away at first or you’re still waiting for someone to open the door,” he recalls, highlighting how in a closed prison, they check on you at night time.

“For the first month, the officers in Loughan House will open the door and look in, and I jumped up, it was almost childlike. It’s funny now but it’s also a thing that you wouldn’t want your family to ever see in you, that mistrust of the door opening.”

For the first three months of his time in custody, David says he had to sleep on the floor in Wheatfield Prison.

“That’s not because they didn’t like me or they were punishing me, it was just the way it was,” he remembers.

“Then I was in Cloverhill, there were four of us so I had to sleep under a counter.”

“I was like Harry Potter,” he laughs.

MINDFULNESS

David has spent a lot of his time in prison reflecting on his life and is now “very big” on mindfulness and mental wellness. The serene setting of Loughan House, he feels, adds to its meditative nature.

“I wouldn’t know many other men who have taken time to sit back and get a new perspective on life,” David says.

“I’ll come out regenerated as a person. I have had that approach of, ‘I’m here, what can I do to make the best of it?’”

“I go down to the lake in the mornings when no one’s there. I sit at the end of the pier, it’s so romantic,” he laughs.

“I have some mindfulness time to myself every morning but, if you can’t find that in Loughan somewhere, there’s something wrong with you, it’s not the place.”

SUNSETS

Being of “able body and sound mind” in a closed prison can deteriorate a person, David believes.

“I actually wondered why you can never see the sun rise or set from Wheatfield; turns out it was designed that way,” he says.

“It was actually a natural lighting architectural design that you never had the light coming in through the window, and it never faded. You just had a constant gloom, and I remember thinking I haven’t seen the sun rise or set in months.”

In a closed prison, prisoners are “just thrown in with anyone”.

“I was in with people smoking crack, another guy sniffing tablets,” David recalls.

“I put my food on the same table, we ended up having an argument over it and I just thought: ‘Where am I?’.”

Staff in a closed prison might also have to respond to fights or an outbreak of drugs, whereas in Loughan House, if anyone misbehaves, they are sent straight back to a closed institution.

“It’s good to remember that you can be sent back there,” David feels.

“The time you owe is the time you owe.”

In Loughan House, David says that prisoners are treated based on their actions: “Be a grown up, we’ll treat you like a grown up or act like a child and you’ll be treated like one, and some people aren’t able for it.”

He believes that Loughan House is taking the right approach when it comes to the reform of a prisoner, it just depends on “whether the individual takes it”.

David works five hours at a house in the local community twice per week, which is a “stepping stone” to him going out into full-time employment, and is “unheard of in the prison system”. Through work, he feels responsible and helping out in the community makes him feel like he is contributing.

“People don’t earn money in prison unless it’s through illegal ways,” says David, who also works in the laundry, in the admin building, and volunteers for the Tidy Towns once per week.

“There’s not a hope of that in any other prison, you don’t get paid for work, you work to be on an enhanced standing.”

Entering prison, you’re “stripped of privileges”. Through good behaviour, prisoners are given more opportunities, including better access to the gym, the yard, the school and more phone calls home.

REMISSION

“All going well,” David hopes to earn some extra remission over standard remission, which is a reduction in the length of your sentence by up to one quarter of a year, granted for good behaviour. Prisoners can also get out on community release schemes for completing unpaid community work, which is what he is “striving for.”

“I’ve said to my family since the day I came in, I’m coming, no matter how long it takes, and it makes me feel like I’m contributing to getting there, it gives you that self worth and there’s a lot to be said for that.”

For the past 18 months, on each passing day, David has read his copy of the poem ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley, quoting to this newspaper: ‘It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate.’

SUPPORTING HIS FAMILY

Earning money “means everything” to David and it gives him “a lot of dignity” as it allows him to support his family, helping to pay for school uniforms and Christmas, which he finds “so progressive.” He was also able to buy a basic mobile phone, which he uses to contact his family.

“I went from hoping someone answered the phone for six minutes to every night texting my kids goodnight.

“I can sit in my room and speak to my kids. My kids are actually sick of hearing from me,” he jokes.

The changing dynamic of his family is something he is conscious of, as his children are growing up while he is in custody. This is something that many prisoners go through.

“If you’ve a guy doing eight years, if he comes in here and the young lad is nine, he’s going back out, then he’s a teenager,” explains Mr Higgins.

“We’ve had this with prisoners, they talk about where they belong at the table even.”

GRADUAL REINTRODUCTION

A “gradual reintroduction”, the assistant governor says, works well for prisoners nearing the end of their sentence, who get out on temporary release and can spend some time with their loved ones.

When David reaches the final two years of his sentence, he will be able to go home every eight weeks. This will increase in frequency to once a month in the final 18 months, and twice a month for the last year.

During his time here, he has seen some prisoners returning from temporary release that spent their time drinking or doing drugs being sent back to closed prisons, which he thinks is “fair”.

“If I’m being honest, If you didn’t take the opportunity to go out and start to rebuild your life and you took it to go out and get drunk or get stoned, then you haven’t learned anything,” David remarks.

“It’s hard being away from your family, there’s no walking back to the door and going ‘Daddy’s home’. So I get why they do it that way,” he adds.

“You go back a few weekends, you build the relationships back, people get used to you, and see where it goes.”

David has regular video calls with his family but he doesn’t like to bring them up to visit him much because neither he nor his family want to “normalise” his situation.

“That can be hard but the last time my [child] was up, it was [their] birthday and to be honest, I felt like such a scumbag,” he remembers.

“That’s what [they were] doing on [their] birthday but that’s my cross to bear, that’s not anything to do with the prison.”

As well as working within the local community, David has also spoken to school students during arranged visits to the prison, warning young people about the choices they make in life.

“I wish I could tell you that I woke up that morning and made the choice to go and do something and it went wrong that day but it didn’t,” David admits.

“I made a choice a couple of years before that led me to another bad choice.

“People always think there’s this right or wrong path, sometimes all the choices you made to get there; that’s just a bad one and that’s a [worse] one, and that’s what got me there.

“But that’s it, all the paths have been wiped clean. I stood in front of the judge, I took the punishment. So all the paths in front of me now are clear. There’s good choices to be made.”

As much as he has witnessed the “worst in humanity” while in custody, David has also seen some of the kindest acts in his life and believes there is “a lot of good” here.

“I’ve seen people with nothing offer someone who is struggling something they had, and that’s so humbling,” he says.

“It depends on what your perspective is when you look at something.”

“One thing with us up here and in any prison is the diverseness of the individual men that made individual mistakes, and if anyone thinks that they can’t land themselves with a bad decision in prison, think again because they’re good at catching people who make mistakes.”

The “overwhelming” sensation of feeling like a “loser” when his child visited still lingers in David’s mind, and he acknowledges that “it’s not all rosy up here”.

“You’ve a lot to deal with in yourself. You just have to own it, that’s part of the punishment, isn’t it?”

*David’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

>>>Next week: Roísín McManus catches up with employers in the community who give Loughan House residents an opportunity

Read the first in the series

INSIDE LOUGHAN HOUSE: A path to ‘better choices in life’