Posted: 28/11/2012



Deadline: 28/11/2012

Details of Role

Bású/Execution’, is a five-part series of documentaries starting on TG4 on Thursday, 22 Nov 2012. Funded by TG4, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and Black Rock Pictures, it traces the lives of well-known republicans executed by the Irish Free State Government in 1922, one Englishman and four Irishmen. Democracy was suspended in an effort to protect democracy. By the end of the Civil War, seventy-seven anti-Treaty activists had been executed, leaving a legacy probably more bitter and lasting than anything else in the Irish revolution.Thur, 22 Nov, 9.30 pm - Erskine Childers - Sasanach Mallaithe (Damned Englishman), the one they feared the most. He was the capable, able, principled traitor who betrayed his country, his culture, his class, an extraordinary conversion from staunch British Imperialist to hard-line Irish republican for the cause of Irish freedom. He was executed for possession of a handgun given to him for his own protection by Michael Collins.Thur, 29 Nov, 9.30 pm - Rory O’Connor - Aon Chuspóir Amháin (One Purpose Alone). Keeper of the republican flame, he was the implacable force of ‘hearts with one purpose alone’ - an independent Irish Republic. His story is the classic clash between single-minded commitment to principle and the brutal exercise of power by the state.Thur, 6 Dec, 9.30 pm - Joe McKelvey - Trasna na Teorann (Across the Border) - the story of Irish partition. He grew up a Catholic in the divided community of Ulster and carried with him to the end the bitter taste of betrayal at the Anglo-Irish Treaty.Thur, 13 Dec, 9.30 pm - Liam Mellows - Dearg agus Glas (The Reds and The Green). Mellows was the standard-bearer of James Connolly’s legacy - equality for all, a highly subversive notion to the British Empire, facing revolution in Ireland after World War I. Mellows’ IRA contacts with bolshevism struck fear into the establishment. But he nursed his dream of an Irish socialist republic until it died with him before the Free State firing squad on 8 Dec 1922.Thur, 20 Dec, 9.30 pm - Dick Barrett - Comhraic na gCarad (Brother against brother). Dick Barrett, Michael Collins and Sean Hales and were like brothers growing up together in West Cork. But all three were dead by the end of 1922. The interwoven story of their lives is the tragedy of the Irish Civil War that turned brother against brother.