Examination of witnesses (Questions 300
- 319)
WEDNESDAY 15 JULY 1998
MR MARTIN
NAREY and DR
PETER BENNETT
300. So when you answered the question from
my colleague earlier to the effect that you did not see that Mr
Mogg holding both positions was to the detriment of the prison
in terms of the scope of your inquiry, it might to the extent
that if someone else had been supervising the activities of the
Governor of the Maze or if Mr Mogg had been supervising the activities
of some other governor there may have been other directives given?
(Mr Narey) There may have been, I accept that.
The only conclusion that we can come to based on what we had seen
was that despite believing very strongly that doing both roles
was inappropriate and an impossible challenge we did believe that
Mr Mogg had developed some small but significant improvements
in security since he had been there.
301. Did most of those changes not take
place after the killing of Billy Wright?
(Mr Narey) No, I think there had been some improvement
in the randomness of cell searching, and in some very basic things
like fabric checks and so forth.
302. Improvements in cell searching? This
is since 40 tonnes of soil were hidden in cells and nobody noticed,
but still after that change had taken place it was possible to
have a gun brought into the prison without Mr Mogg's improvements
being responsible for discovering them.
(Mr Narey) Yes. I am not suggesting that the improvements
that had been made have been comprehensive. I would be very cautious
as a member of the England and Wales Prison Service to suggest
that it is impossible to get a gun into a prison. Even in our
very high security prisons with very sophisticated technology
it is extremely difficult, but not impossible, to do that.
303. Have you been back at the Maze since
you delivered your report?
(Mr Narey) No, I have not.
304. And you therefore have no knowledge
of whether your recommendations have been satisfactorily implemented?
(Mr Narey) No.
Mr McWalter
305. I would like to draw your attention
to what I regard as a rather coy paragraph in your report, paragraph
1.21. Reading from the third line, you say, "... the current
Governor's approach to managing the prison ... is founded on an
honest recognition of the unique nature of the Maze. There is
no point in pretending that it is a normal prison. This pretence
has, in large part, been the basis of the very negative publicity
about the prison .... The differences in the running of the Maze
should be publicly acknowledged. This will allow staff to stop
feeling ashamed at their perceived failure to run the Maze like
a `proper prison' ... and will perhaps allow them to ..."
do some other things. This all relates to what Dr Bennett said
earlier to us about the fact that the job the people who work
there do is not clearly defined, they have a tension between on
the one hand thinking they are prison officers and then being
told it is not "a proper prison" or that it is a unique
prison, or that it is not a normal prison. I find this paragraph
coy because you do not actually tell me what it is. We have a
population there who define themselves as political prisoners,
we also have a population there of people who have committed what
many of us regard as heinous crimes. So are we to focus on their
definition of themselves, in which case you arrive at one way
of running things, or are we to focus on the definition of them
as criminals, in which case you do another job? Or do you faff
about in between and never quite say what it is you are doing
and never give anybody any clear directions, in which case it
is quite obvious why the place is a mess, in which case the responsibility
for this is not members of the POA or middle management or the
governors or Mr Mogg or anybody else, it is actually the fault
of possibly successive governments, that they have not been honest
and admitted what kind of establishment they are running? What
is your response to that?
(Mr Narey) What I was trying to convey in that
paragraph, Mr McWalter, is that there are all sorts of terms used
by different people to describe the Maze——
306. Like a detention centre?
(Mr Narey) ——the reality is, and I
think I refer to it in paragraph 1.21, they do act very differently.
All of us on the inquiry team have worked in dispersal prisons
with terrorist prisoners in England and Wales but in much smaller
number. The difference between those prisoners in England and
Wales and in the Maze is that prisoners in the Maze act with careful
organisation, discipline, have huge community support and ability
to intimidate, and they act collectively at all times. On top
of everything else, 29 prison officers have been murdered. I think
that alone leads one to accept that you have to treat the prison
very differently. I mentioned it before, and it is a bit of a
cliché in prison management generally, one should not ask
a member of staff to do something which you would not be willing
to do yourself. I would not be willing to work in an isolated
position on one of the residential legs of the wings on the Maze,
and I would not like to ask a prison officer to do that. What
I was trying to suggest, perhaps not as clearly as I might have
done, was that it should be acknowledged and the public should
be educated about the Maze. It is not a holiday camp but nor is
it a prison in the normal understanding of a top security prison
in England and Wales.
307. Would you accept that if you had been
clearer about this here your report might have been more effective
on the basis it would have given a clarity of function which Dr
Bennett has suggested is necessary? You indicated that perhaps
you might have been clearer about it, I have expressed this paragraph
as coy, but it seems to me to be the absolute key to your report
and yet when we need to be clear about what we are doing there
it faffs around. We do not know what kind of thing it is that
you want out of the people who run this organisation.
(Mr Narey) Of course, it could have been clearer,
but I think it is reasonably clear. For the reasons I have just
stated it says that the Maze is very different and cannot, in
my view, be run as a normal prison. Part of the unhappiness and
the low morale of staff and the apathy of staff and anxiety, comes
from a failure of that to be recognised. We found some staff of
all grades who were clearly quite distressed at the fact they
were not running the prison in the way they thought a prison should
be run. I think the message should be given to them that until
the tragic events of December last year, they had had a quite
astounding security record at the Maze which outstripped, incidentally,
most security records of dispersal prisons in England and Wales.
Frankly, they should have been proud of that, not feeling deeply
ashamed about it.
(Dr Bennett) Also, I felt that we were bringing
the whole issue into the arena for public debate, and that is
occurring at the moment, and that it was sufficient for us to
say what we said, and that needs now to be followed up. It is
important, I think, that we have raised the issue and it is a
significant issue for the future I think.
308. So the report does need a paragraph
1.22 saying exactly what 1.21 says, does it?
(Dr Bennett) Perhaps you have interpreted it yourself.
309. Because your recommendations in the
end do just relate to a conventional prison. You have, "Full
searching of prisoners on the basis of intelligence should be
reintroduced" and that kind of thing. In the end you go back
to the definition of it being a prison which has had a certain
laxness in the way it is run and you want it all tightened up
again, but at the same time there is this feeling in the report
that perhaps some recognition has to be taken of the definition
of prisoners by themselves as political.
(Mr Narey) One of the purposes of the paragraph
was that I anticipated that the report and the recommendations
about general security might be severely criticised on the basis
that this was an inadequate response to the security lapses which
had led to the escape of a terrorist prisoner and a murder. Part
of this chapter was to try to describe why I thought a rather
different response was necessary for a security review of the
Maze than would have been appropriate, for example, if I had been
doing a security review of a dispersal prison in England and Wales
where, for example, an absolutely key ingredient would have been
very extensive staff coverage in the residential areas.
Mr Donaldson
310. Mr Narey, in your report, amongst the
list of groups that you met in drawing up your report, were officials
from the Irish Government. I was a little puzzled as to why you
felt the need to meet officials from the Irish Government, given
that they have no executive role in respect of the Northern Ireland
Prison Service. I just wonder if you would care to explain why
you felt meeting Irish Government officials was relevant to the
drawing up of your report?
(Mr Narey) We invited people from a number of
organisations—political parties, of course, many of whom
we saw, and a large number of interest groups. We invited anyone
who we thought might have a view or an opinion on the Maze and
the way it was managed. Irish Government officials were just one
of a very large number of groups and they did come and see us
and they did have a view which, as it happened, chimed in pretty
closely with the views we got from other groups about the difficulties
of running the Maze, as I said to Mr McWalter, like a normal prison.
311. Yes, but are you saying in effect that
you invited the Irish Government to make representations to you?
(Mr Narey) That is correct.
312. You did?
(Mr Narey) Yes.
313. Did you invite any other governments,
apart from the Irish Government, to make representations to you?
(Mr Narey) No, I did not.
314. Did you regard the Irish Government
therefore as having a particular or special interest in respect
of prisoners which did not arise for any other government or,
for example, any other Member State within the European Union?
(Mr Narey) While clearly being aware that the
Irish Government had no executive authority over the Northern
Ireland Prison Service—but then again nor did a number of
pressure groups we spoke to—I did believe they had a particular
interest in what was happening in the Maze Prison and they might
have a view to offer. It does not mean that I necessarily accepted
their view, but I thought their interest was a legitimate one.
315. How would you describe that particular
interest?
(Mr Narey) We were not oblivious to the fact,
when we were doing this inquiry, indeed we could not have been
oblivious because every single group we spoke to reminded us of
it, that our investigation was taking place in the midst of attempts
to effect a peace in Northern Ireland and it was in that context
we believed the officials from the Irish Government had a legitimate
interest.
316. You also met the leaders of all the
factions in the Maze, the various paramilitary groupings. What
particular interest did you feel they had in respect of ensuring
that there was good security at the Maze Prison?
(Mr Narey) I think there were two reasons for
seeing the prisoner groups. First of all, we tried to approach
this so far as we could under the special circumstances of the
Maze, in a way that we would approach an investigation into a
prison in England and Wales, and in those circumstances one would
always give an opportunity for prisoners to give their point of
view about situations such as this. Secondly, we were trying to
tease out the reasonableness of some of the recommendations which
we were moving towards. In particular, I was trying to tease out
with the prisoner groups my contention that there needed to be
much greater searching when they were leaving the prisoner areas
and, as I reported, all the prisoner groups acknowledged that
part of the exchange for having a high degree of self-determination
on the wings was that they had to accept higher degrees of searching
when they left.
317. Reference was made earlier to management
within the Maze Prison. One of the issues you addressed in your
report was the question of rival factions, i.e. in the case of
the murder of prisoner Wright, the LVF and INLA being placed in
one H Block. As I understand it, at various levels in the management
of the Maze prison concerns were expressed to Governor Mogg about
the security of that situation. You acknowledge in your report
that Governor Mogg spoke with the leaders of both the LVF and
INLA on a number of occasions and consequently believed that neither
would launch a first strike against the other and yet that was
being contradicted by advice he was receiving at various levels
from his own management who were expressing concerns about the
security of that situation. I think Governor Mogg is on public
record as saying that perhaps that was an error. I have searched
to see if you reached a conclusion on that because it is an issue
about management, it is an issue about the running of the Maze
prison, whether in fact the governor should be taking his advice
from his management team or whether he should be taking the word
of the leaders of the paramilitary groupings. In this case, tragically
for prisoner Wright, it was the advice of the management team
which proved the correct advice and that is that the factions
should be separated. Do you think the Governor made a mistake,
and would you like to address whether there are any issues that
flow from that that could be touched upon by the Prison Service?
(Mr Narey) I will try, Mr Donaldson. I think running
any high security prison is extremely difficult. As a governor,
and Dr Bennett may want to add to this as he has had more experience
of being a governor than I, one has to constantly weigh up security
reports about possible security breaches, particularly in a prison
like the Maze. My belief is that if you responded to all the security
reports, all indications of risks towards security from your staff,
including middle managers, you would not run the prison. In the
Maze you would barely let anyone out of the wing under any circumstances
it was so difficult. Secondly, my recollection is that the deputy
governor shared Mr Mogg's view that there would not be a first
strike. I think that was a tragic conclusion to reach because
clearly it was proven wrong, but my belief is that it was an acceptable
and entirely understandable conclusion to reach in those circumstances.
He was faced with immense difficulties of trying to house two
separate factions on the wing with one block closed after rioting.
He believed he had taken precautions to prevent the dreadful assassination
and he was proven wrong, but I do not think he was negligent and,
as he offered on the famous Spotlight programme, I do not
necessarily think he was naive either.
318. In circumstances where his management
team on the ground observing the situation and in day-to-day contact
with the situation are saying there is a risk and that subsequently
is proven to be the case, surely it is an error of judgment on
the part of the governor if he ignores that advice. The only reason
one can conclude that he ignored the advice was that he took the
word of the faction leaders, the paramilitaries, the terrorist
prisoners, that they would not strike at each other, or is there
another conclusion?
(Mr Narey) I honestly do not believe that was
the case. It would certainly have been extremely negligent of
Mr Mogg if he had ignored that advice. I do not think he did ignore
that advice. I think he put it in the balance with other intelligence.
He certainly discussed it with his senior managers. His senior
managers were by no means unanimous in advising of the possible
danger. As I have said, I certainly recollect the deputy governor
did not share that. I think he put that in the balance, as governors
of prisoners need to do, every single day and decided that the
risk was acceptable. The number of security information reports
which a governor in a high security prison receives every day
are very very considerable in number.
(Dr Bennett) I can reinforce that. You have many
conflicting sources of advice, particularly in security information
reports and at the Maze this is much more than it would be in
most prisons in England and Wales. The Governor of the Maze did
take note of the conflicting advice that he received and carried
out a risk assessment and we were satisfied that he had carried
out his risk assessment and should not bear the responsibility.
He is responsible for the decision, yes, but given the situation,
given what he had taken account of, we thought that the decision
was regrettable, but we did not see it as naive.
319. But given that two of the prisoners—and
one must be careful, I know, Chairman, because there are charges
outstanding and criminal proceedings—who were allegedly
involved in the murder of Billy Wright had been involved in previous
incidents involving the use of firearms at HMP Maghaberry and
boasts that they had made at Maghaberry Prison as to their intentions
with regard to prisoner Wright and given the advice that had been
given by some of the management team about the security situation,
are you really saying that in security terms the Governor exercised
his best judgment which was that there was not a significant security
risk and that therefore it was from his perspective an acceptable
risk to continue to have those prisoners housed in the same block?
(Mr Narey) When viewed against the options that
he had, when there was simply nowhere else to put them and because
he did not enjoy, as we enjoy in England, having about 16 top
security prisons in which you can distribute dangerous prisoners
and share them around and therefore separate them and make them
safe, what he clearly did was to prove disastrous. Some people
would argue it was unwise. I honestly believe it was understandable,
nevertheless, and I would not like to suggest that if I had been
in Martin Mogg's shoes as Governor I might not have come to the
same conclusion.
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