High Walls, Blue Sky
April 25 th 2009 (repeated April 26 th)
Producer: Peter Hegarty
‘High Walls, Blue Sky’ recalls life inside Spike Island prison. It’s a place with a colourful history, from which only a few ever escaped. In the Victorian age Spike was the laboratory for imaginative but failed penal reforms, securing its handover in 1938 was one of De Valera’s greatest political coups, the prison closed for the final time in 1985 after witnessing the worst prison riots in Irish history.
