Kinlen, Dermot Patrick (1930–2007), barrister, judge and penal reformer, was born 24 April 1930 in Dublin, the eldest of two sons and one daughter of Louis P. Kinlen, of Darwin Hall, 200 Rathfarnham Road, Dublin, a building contractor, and his wife Aileen (née O'Donnell). Educated at St Mary's College, Rathmines, Co. Dublin; Clongowes Wood College, Clane, Co. Kildare; and St Conleth's College, Dublin (childhood ill-health was a factor in these moves), he studied history at UCD, where he was auditor of the dramatic society, and graduated with a first-class BA (1949). Graduating BL (1951) from the King's Inns, Dublin, he was called to the Irish bar in November 1952.
Practising on the south-western circuit, in Cork, Kerry and Clare, Kinlen reinvigorated the family connections of his maternal grandfather, Tom O'Donnell (qv), MP for Kerry West 1900–18. He developed an extensive practice, becoming in his own words 'a big fish in a small pond' (Limerick Leader, 23 February 2002). Supportive of the need for a university in the south-west of Ireland, he prepared, pro bono publico, the legal submissions of the Limerick university project committee for the commission on higher education (1960–67), chaired by Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh (qv).
Kinlen represented Gulf Oil after an oil spill that occurred at Whiddy Island, Bantry, Co. Cork, in December 1969. Appointed senior counsel on 12 March 1971, he moved his practice to Dublin and established himself as a leading figure at the bar. He acted for Dublin Corporation at a 1976 planning enquiry into a proposed siting of an oil refinery in Dublin bay, during the Wood Quay excavation saga of the 1970s, and at the 1981 tribunal investigating the Stardust disaster. He was also counsel for Bureau Veritas (an international maritime testing, inspection, management and certification body) at the tribunal of inquiry into the 1979 Whiddy Island disaster. Kinlen represented the plaintiffs in the litigation (1982–8) concerning ownership of the ninth-century Derrynaflan hoard, discovered in Co. Tipperary in 1980, which had a significant impact on the law of treasure trove and led to the 1994 National Monuments (Amendment) Act.
A member of the International Commission of Jurists, with Seán MacBride (qv) he represented the commission at the 1984 trials of Fr Niall O'Brien and Fr Brendan Gore in the Philippines; falsely accused of murder by the Marcos regime, the priests were supporters of indigenous peoples' and workers' rights. Kinlen wrote a number of reports for the commission's committee on human rights violations at prisoner re-education camps in Vietnam (1980), and visited prisons in Cuba, Hong Kong and China. In 1990 the UK and Irish governments nominated Kinlen as a deputy judge of the appeals board (latterly administrative tribunal) of the OECD in Paris, on which he remained until 2005.
A member of the visiting committee of St Patrick's Institution for juvenile offenders (1971–90), and chairman of the visiting committee of Mountjoy Prison (1990–93), Kinlen was a founding member of Prisoners' Aid Through Community Effort (PACE), which sought to assist the reintegration of former prisoners. His concern for all (he espoused the rights of the Irish travelling community from early in his career) evoked his commitment to human rights and the humane treatment of prisoners. Kinlen was especially exercised by the appalling conditions young offenders endured in St Patrick's Institution, often being held in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. Urging rehabilitation, he castigated the prison service for, in effect, institutionally grooming recidivism.
Kinlen was appointed a judge of the high court on 7 October 1993, nominated by Labour party leader and tánaiste Dick Spring, somewhat unexpectedly due to his established links to Fianna Fáil. He retired as a high court judge on 19 April 2002 upon reaching the mandatory age of 72. On 24 April 2002, John O'Donoghue, the minister for justice, appointed Kinlen (who had previously declined a position on the planning tribunal) inspector of prisons and places of detention on an administrative (non-statutory) basis. The first such appointment since 1835, Kinlen avidly engaged his remit, producing a series of lively and frank annual reports. The first, in 2003, demonstrated clear contempt for bureaucratic and political inaction, and elucidated the unintentional impact of freedom of information legislation (enacted in 1997) on the Department of Justice, which discouraged the recording of policy formulation and political decisions in writing. His second annual report was edited against his will by the Department of Justice, and released in April 2005 with a rider asserting the excisions had been made for legal reasons. This incensed Kinlen, who asserted publicly that he was happy to stand over the report; the suggestion of Minister for Justice Michael McDowell that sections of the report as submitted may have been libellous was dismissed by Kinlen, who responded that the minister's assertion could itself be construed as defamatory (Ir. Times, 19 July 2007). Although Kinlen was respectful of McDowell from their time together at the bar, considering him capable of directing much-needed reforms, the two men developed an increasingly frosty relationship that was often played out in public.
Despite latent official expectations that he would investigate little in his part-time role, Kinlen took his responsibilities seriously, fighting for and winning an office and support staff. He undertook regular and unannounced prison visits, and liaised with a variety of groups interested in penal reform. In direct language he reported the lack of basic facilities and the degrading conditions in which many prisoners were held. Whatever the philosophical and political merits of prevailing prisons policy, he pragmatically addressed service provision and prison conditions from a human rights perspective, and lambasted, especially in light of the significant expenditure on the prison service (then with the highest officer-to-prisoner ratio in the world), the ongoing failure to imbue Irish prisons with a rehabilitative ethos. He continually argued for probation for lesser offences, and emphasised the frequency with which debtors were jailed in Ireland.
Specific visitation reports highlighted the generally poor conditions in which prisoners were housed. Addressing the widespread degradation of prisoners' human rights, his reports highlighted continued overcrowding, decrepit sanitary conditions, and the paucity of educational, vocational and social facilities. Kinlen railed against the lack of provision for mental health treatment and services, especially as such a high proportion of those incarcerated exhibited symptoms of mental illness and suffered from addiction. The provision of such services was so inadequate that he noted the possibility of censure of the government by the Council of Europe.
Perhaps most damningly, Kinlen decried the Irish prison regime's disdain for addressing endemic recidivism, censuring the absence of even basic statistics on the re-incarceration rate. His fourth report (2005) described the bureaucratic and political capacity of the Department of Justice to manage the prison system and safeguard the rights of prisoners as 'fascist', 'pathetic' and 'unbelievable'. The Whitaker report (1985), which drew attention to various failings in the Irish prison system, served as a benchmark against which Kinlen decried the department's inaction: 'Ministerial and departmental obsession with power, control and secrecy has changed little in the intervening twenty years, nor has the disdain for independent criticism or oversight of the workings of the Department of Justice and the prison service. For this reason, far too many of the problems identified in [the Whitaker Report] have not been addressed, and continue to thrive' (quoted in Whitaker committee report 20 years on, p. 12).
Kinlen's 2006 report was released four months after its submission by Kinlen and on the same day that two prisoners died in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, but was little reported in the press as the Department of Justice announced a new pre-election crackdown on 'illegal immigrants' the same day. Ironically, Kinlen had repeatedly highlighted the anomaly that immigrants awaiting deportation were not convicted criminals or awaiting trial and therefore should not be held in prisons. Kinlen lobbied for the establishment of an independent statutory ombudsman for prisoners, noting that many of the improvements to the Northern Ireland penal system brought in by the 1998 Good Friday agreement went unmatched in the Republic.
A close friend of Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, Kinlen visited China with him in May 1977 seeking to establish Sino–Irish links, at a time when the People's Republic of China was unrecognised by the Republic of Ireland. A frequent visitor thereafter, Kinlen worked for establishment of diplomatic links between the two countries (which were effected in 1979). President of the Irish Chinese Cultural Society (1982–5), he visited China in 1980 with former taoiseach Jack Lynch (qv), and again in 1985, and hosted a return delegation in 1986. In 1998 he led a EU delegation of Irish high court judges on a visit there promoting human rights and judicial independence, hosting a reciprocal visit to Dublin and Munster the following year. Kinlen was honoured, along with John de Courcy Ireland (qv), as an 'ambassador of friendship' to China in 2002 at a ceremony in the Chinese embassy in Dublin.
The University of Limerick awarded Kinlen an honorary doctorate of law (2002), of which he was immensely proud, having served as chairperson of the advisory board of the school of law there for some time. Pope John Paul II made him a knight commander of the Equestrian Order of St Gregory the Great (Kinlen jested that the distinction allowed him to receive holy communion on horseback). Called to the bar in England and in New South Wales, Australia, Kinlen was a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.
A gregarious entertainer in his Dublin and Kerry homes, Kinlen made friends wherever he went. He regularly hosted diplomatic and legal friends and visitors in Kerry, and promoted the county in particular and Ireland in general as a tourist destination. A generous patron of the arts in Ireland, he was director of the Hunt Museum, Limerick, a member of the RDS, and was active in the Sneem Drama Society.
Despite ongoing health issues, Kinlen remained active in fulfilling his remit; his final prisons' report was completed before his death but only released on the Department of Justice website on Friday 21 December 2007, the last working day before Christmas. Kinlen died 18 July 2007 at his home, Kinloch, outside Sneem, Co. Kerry. His funeral took place from the church of the Sacred Heart, Donnybrook, Dublin, on 21 July 2007, and he was buried in Deansgrange cemetery. He never married, and was survived by his sister Aideen (a barrister and nun) and brother Kevin.