Mountjoy inmate sentenced for prison officer attack

By David O’Sullivan

A prisoner who head-butted an officer in Mountjoy Prison, leaving him with bulging spinal discs and afraid to return to work, has been sentenced to two years and nine months imprisonment.

Bernard Corrigan (39), currently serving a sentence in Mountjoy Prison, appeared before Judge Orla Crowe in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Friday having pleaded guilty to assault causing harm of a prison officer in Mountjoy Prison on December 27, 2021.

An investigating garda told Aideen Collard BL, prosecuting, that the prison officer had been called to a floor of the prison where a prisoner was banging on a door. Corrigan was standing nearby.

After dealing with the prisoner, he heard someone say something to him. He turned around and asked what had been said when “all of a sudden” Corrigan attacked him.

Corrigan headbutted him and punched him numerous times. The assault was recorded on CCTV.

The prison officer suffered injuries and soreness to his left arm, torso and neck. Two discs in his spine were bruised and sore and an MRI revealed they were bulging.

In a victim impact statement handed in to the court, the prison officer said the assault left him “in excruciating pain” and that he wasn’t able to work for six months after the incident.

He wrote: “I was not sure if I’d ever return to work with the fear of being assaulted again”.

“…The longer I was off the greater the fear of something similar happening.”

“It has impacted my life in more ways than I thought,” he wrote, and said that the assault left him and his family with a big financial cost.

Karl Monahan BL, defending, said the injured party made a full recovery and that Corrigan wishes to communicate an apology to him.

He said his client was going “through a dark time at that particular time” and that “he felt he was being heckled for something he hadn’t said”.

Mr Monahan told the court his client has been “effectively homeless from an early age” and has been using heroin since the age of 15 or 16.

He said aside from this incident, “he was always respectful of staff” and that there was “nothing that would indicate a violent disposition” in his history.

Corrigan has 147 previous convictions. These were for burglary, theft, handling stolen property, possession of stolen property, failure to appear, road traffic offences and public order offences.

Sentencing Corrigan, Judge Crowe described the attack as “utterly unprovoked” and “reprehensible.”

She said the aggravating factors included that it was an “unprovoked attack on a prison officer in a prison” as well as the amount of Corrigan’s previous convictions.

Mitigating factors included that Corrigan pleaded guilty, that the prison officer made a full recovery and that Corrigan made an apology, she said.

Judge Crowe sentenced him to two years and nine months imprisonment. This sentence was backdated to when Corrigan entered his guilty plea on October 25, 2023 and will run concurrently to the sentence he is already serving.

Corrigan’s earliest release date is March 2, 2027, the court heard.