The "head should roll" of the official who authorised the temporary release of a prisoner convicted of murder who murdered again while on release, the Dáil was told.
Mr Jim Higgins (FG, Mayo) said it was a "gross understatement" to say it was "disturbing" and a "systems failure" that Thomas Murray, who was convicted of murder in 1998, then murdered an 80-year-old retired national teacher, Mrs Nancy Nolan, in February 2000 while on temporary release.
Mr Higgins said the Garda had recommended that he not be released and that any application should be rejected. "While on temporary release he broke his midnight curfew," he said. He made lewd suggestions to local girls. He was suspected of setting fire to a property belonging to a garda.
The Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, said it was a "grave tragedy" that the individual was ever released. He apologised again to Mrs Nolan's family. "I am deeply sorry on behalf of the Department, I am sorry on behalf of the Prison Service, I am sorry on behalf of the then government and this Government."
He said that temporary release was "not an exact science", but he acknowledged that the report on the procedures followed for Murray's release showed a "discrepancy in the record" of what was decided about the progression of the temporary releases in October 1999 into the care of the prisoner's father.
Following subsequent inquiries, the director-general of the Prison Service could not "reconcile the accounts of the officials concerned".
The prisoner breached the conditions of his release twice in 1996 and in July 1998, when he was convicted of indecent exposure.
