Patrick O'Connell

The shouting and roaring was obviously heard by the prison officers.

They have a system in place for handling incidents like this.

Straight away, the governor would have been informed and officers would have been brought in to try and negotiate with Sean Powell.

That didn't work in this case, although they could hear him threatening the two prisoners inside the cell.

He wasn't receptive to efforts to negotiate with him.

So a decision was made to shut down the entire prison.

Yeah, well, in the case involving Sean Powell, it was handled extremely effectively.

There was two prisoners in that cell with him who very much felt that they were in danger of being seriously injured, if not killed.

And it was brought to a conclusion where Sean Powell was effectively disarmed and these two men escaped without serious injury, other than the trauma that they quite obviously endured.

Going back, I suppose, to what happened, this was on Monday of last week on the B-Wing in Castlebury Prison.

Sean Powell is a 34-year-old.

He'd be regarded as a somewhat volatile prisoner before this point, but basically he barricaded the door of his cell.

He'd armed himself with a number of blighted weapons.

Made with what?

Well basically these are called shivs.

They're where you attach razor blades to a plastic item and then you can use it to slash and inflict severe injuries on other prisoners.

So he barricaded the door.

He'd armed himself with these shivs.

He tied up the other two prisoners in the cell and basically was threatening them.

I'm told that these were run-of-the-mill shivs.