Tales from Dublin’s Notorious HIV/AIDS Separation Unit
In the ’80s, Dublin’s largest prison — Mountjoy Jail — created a separation unit for HIV/AIDS sufferers. These are their harrowing stories
A bag of heroin was much easier to acquire than a job for the people of Dublin in 1979. A combination of overcrowding, containerisation of cargo at the docks (resulting in a dramatic loss of employment) and newly-available, cheap heroin from Iran had set the scene for an epidemic in opioid abuse.
Research reveals that, by 1982, one in 10 people aged 15 to 24 in parts of Dublin’s inner city had tried heroin. The crisis was reflected in the police statistics of the time; Dublin saw five drug charges in 1979 and 177 in 1982.
Those who were convicted or remanded inevitably ended up in Mountjoy prison, Dublin; a place where one-third of the prison population had at some stage injected heroin.
With no effort to educate prisoners on the dangers of sharing needles, an HIV outbreak materialised — one that the Irish prison service was both absolutely unprepared for and totally ill-equipped to deal with.
The initial response from the Irish prison service was to just set HIV+ prisoners free. This, perhaps predictably, led to an…
