Exhibition: Time to Think

In 1985 students in prison and prison officers in the Republic of Ireland were able to study with The Open University for the first time - before the general population in the Republic were able to study with the OU. In the first clip on this page Kevin Warner, National Co-ordinator of Education for the Department of Justice, describes how this came about as a result of a meeting with Diana Purcell, OU Senior Counsellor in Belfast.

Twenty-five of these twenty-nine new students in 1985 were in the Republican sections of Portlaoise Prison (County Laois) and this was the start of many students taking up OU study over the following years. Kevin Warner remembers:

I did worry at one stage whether the paramilitaries, the IRA in particular, would feel ... reluctant to take part in an Open University programme that came from England...

Kevin Warner

This turned out not to be the case, helped by the fact that the then British Secretary of State for Education had at that time attacked the OU for being a Marxist institution in The Guardian newspaper. One of the students from the 1985 group, Student J, reflected that;

The OU, for us, was brilliant. It opened up all sorts of opportunities that we wouldn't have had. But we as a group saw it as really positive, we were very, very supportive of it.

Student J

In the second audio clip on this page Michael Doorley describes tutoring in Portlaoise Prison. Tutors were also invited to give lectures. In the 1990s Dennis Kennedy, OU tutor for course AD280 'European Studies', remembers being invited to address a group of twenty nine Republican prisoners on 'The folly of Nationalism with special reference to Irish Nationalism':

I must have spent about an hour with a group of twenty or twenty nine with one warder present discussing the folly of Nationalism with special reference to Irish Nationalism; which was as hot and heavy a discussion as you could have wished for... but I thoroughly enjoyed it...

Dennis Kennedy