New radio documentary tells the story of Derry’s ‘Rebel Prisoner’

Produced and presented by Otto Schlindwein, the doc will feature on Newstalk on Sunday morning.

‘Rebel Prisoner’ tells the story of Seamus Cavanagh, a British Army soldier turned Irish Volunteer who was interned in Wormwood Scrubs, Frongoch internment camp and the prison ship Argenta between 1916 and 1924.

The programme, by Raw Nerve Productions, traces the life of this soldier, rebel and prisoner from his experience in wars of empire, to Easter 1916 and into the early 1920s and includes accounts of internment, hunger strike and escape.

The documentary begins with the mystery of a forgotten diary written more than 100 years ago that leads to a story of rebellion and internment. The small notebook was discovered in Derry in the 1990s. It had no name but some curious annotations of numbers and letters and a succinct series of entries with the opening lines: ‘Arrested about 1.45 pm when going back to work, taken to Bishop St, dressed in prison clothes, no charge stated’.

The diary was written by Seamus Cavanagh at the time of the Easter Rising in 1916 and describes his arrest and transport to various prisons, ending up as an internee in Wales.

From here, the story of Seamus unfolds revealing a stubborn, conservative Irish Volunteer.

‘Rebel Prisoner’ will be broadcast on Sunday May 1 at 7am, and will be available on GoLoud and all major podcast platforms. It will be repeated on Newstalk on Saturday, May 7 at 9pm.