Some people get dealt a pretty shit hand in life.

A man's wife is murdered.

A few years later he loses one of his sons to suicide.

Then he is involved in an accident which leaves him incapable of work.

I would call that a pretty raw deal by any standards, and I would expect life to treat him with a certain level of sympathy and compassion.

But there again, this is Ireland, the Land of Saints and Scholars and all that shit.

To alleviate his pain he had taken to growing his own supply of cannabis.  He has a [perfectly justifiable] distrust of so called "conventional medicine" and preferred to use his own initiative and labour to provide his own medication.  He converted his attic and grew six cannabis plants. 

You'd think that would be the end of the story, but you forget that this a law infested country.  He was up in court, where his six plants were described as a "sophisticated operation" [What the fuck? Six plants? Sophisticated?] and he was convicted and given two years in jail for "sale and supply" despite there being no evidence whatsoever that he supplied anyone with the stuff. 

Presumably his pains aren't going to go away just because he is in prison, and we can safely assume that they won't supply him with cannabis for medicinal purposes, so he is going to forced into taking "conventional medicine" even though he objects to the stuff.  Personally I would call that inhumane treatment.

I would dearly like to know how the chap ended up in court in the first place.  He was hardly flooding the local market with his six plants worth of supply, and the plants themselves were nice and cosy up in his attic so presumably some interfering snot poked their nose into his business and dobbed him in it.  I hope they're proud?

Isn't this a wonderful country?