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Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams has spoken of how a North Wales prison camp played an important role in the Irish independence movement, as part of a revealing interview for Welsh TV.

The leading Irish Republican was speaking to journalist and broadcaster Lyn Ebenezer and his son, sports broadcaster Dylan, as part of a programme about the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland.

The programme will be aired on S4C on Sunday, October 2, at 8pm, and features visits to important historic locations in Dublin – and the Fron-goch prison camp near Bala , Gwynedd – as well as interviews with people connected to the Republican movement in Ireland.

After the failed rebellion in Dublin in Easter 1916, 2,500 Republicans were rounded up by the British authorities. Almost 2,000 of those prisoners of war were interned at an old whisky distillery in Fron-goch.

The rebels were detained without trial and without a release date. Many had played no part in the rising.

Historians regard Fron-goch as a key nurturing ground for later military campaigns – a ‘university of rebellion’.

Among the prisoners was Michael Collins, who later became a key figure in the military campaign for independence.

Collins, together with Welshman David Lloyd George, then British Prime Minister, negotiated the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which partitioned Ireland – creating the Irish Free State (later the Republic of Ireland) in the South, and Northern Ireland which remained part of the United Kingdom.

(Image: Brian Lawless/PA Wire)

Lyn Ebenezer is regarded as the world’s leading expert in the history of the Fron-goch prison camp and has written an acclaimed book about the incarceration of the Irish prisoners between June 1916 and their release in December that year.

In the documentary Rebels Iwerddon 1916: Lyn a Dylan Ebenezer, Adams says that the Fron-goch prison could be compared to the Maze Prison, previously called Long Kesh, near Lisburn in Northern Ireland. The prison was used to detain paramilitary prisoners during the Troubles, and Adams himself was interned there in 1973.

“Fron-goch is a very important part of Irish history but it is also important to Welsh history,” Adams tells the programme.

“In many ways, it is very much like what we faced in Long Kesh. I was badly beaten up on a number of occasions. Anyone who isn’t afraid is a fool.

(Image: Niall Carson/PA Wire)

“Being afraid isn’t the issue, the issue is being able to overcome it and that’s the challenge.

“When you were interned you didn’t have a release date, when you were sentenced at least you had a release date and that made the difference in some people’s psychological approach to doing their time.”

Adams also hails Lyn Ebenezer’s book, Fron-goch Camp 1916 and the birth of the IRA, as a “very important historical study” of the prison.

(Image: PA Wire)

Lyn Ebenezer says: “I believe that the time the Irish rebels spent at the prison camp in Wales was pivotal in the history of the Irish battle for independence.

“It is a privilege to meet Gerry Adams and hear him talking about the book and how much he had enjoyed reading it.

“I’d always thought of Gerry Adams as a hard, pragmatic man but I found him to be quite the opposite; he was warm-hearted and full of humour. I feel humbled after meeting him.”

The programme, produced by Rondo Media, includes an interview from the archive with Johnnie Roberts, speaking in 1988.

(Image: Niall Carson/PA Wire)

The late Mr Roberts, 15 at the time, was the only Welshman working at the camp. He worked in the prison kitchens, admired the Irish prisoners, and said: “I was the only Welshman working there and they called me ‘the little Welshman’ and they thought the world of me.

“They detested the English. There were two camps, north and south, and it was those in the south camp who had it worse; it was wet and damp and the Irishmen had to sleep in the damp in a place rife with rats.”

In another archive interview from 1988, a former prisoner William Mullins said: “We were all put together in the same camp, we got to know our counterparts from all over Ireland, we learnt guerrilla tactics and took it on ourselves to form an army and succeed.”