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During the Irish War for Independence of 1919-21, the British operated several internment camps in which thousands of Irish citizens were imprisoned without trial. The former inhabitants of Ballykinlar Camp in County Down are depicted in this Topical Budget newsreel, but other camps included Belfast, Boyle, Curragh, Dundalk, Kilkenny, Kilmainham, Kilworth, Mountjoy, Sligo and Spike Island. By the time a truce was declared on 11 July 1921, there were more than seven thousand Irish political prisoners in British-run jails, many of them arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914. Originally passed as a result of the onset of World War I, it was quietly modified in 1918 to become a potent weapon against Irish troublemakers, many of whom were imprisoned for absurdly trivial reasons. The camp regime was notoriously brutal - prisoners were shot dead for minor infractions, such as standing too close to the barbed wire fence that kept them penned in (the camp magazine was titled Barbed Wire). As a result, the camps may well have been counterproductive: Irish Republican leader Michael Collins, an internee himself, described them as "universities of revolution". This newsreel depicts the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Irish Peace Treaty on December 6 1921. Two days later, all political prisoners were released. Michael Brooke
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1. Long Long Trail to Freedom (1:10)
