After a very successful International Film Festival run, The Queen v Patrick O’Donnell will finally return for the TV premiere on TG4.
The film stars well-known Goath Dobhair actor Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde who plays O’Donnell.
The film reveals on screen for the first time the true story behind one of the most compelling murder plots in Irish history. a thrilling tale of violence, courtroom drama, romance and political intrigue.
Containing evidence from British Home Office files kept secret for 100 years, it raises serious questions about the conviction of the quiet-spoken illiterate Donegal man who killed the infamous informer James Carey on board a ship off the coast of South Africa in 1883.
On a sunny evening in May 1882 two top British officials Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary of Ireland and the undersecretary Thomas Burke were brutally assassinated in The Phoenix Park, Dublin by The Invincibles, a deadly Fenian “cell” who targeted high profile figures to promote their nationalist cause. The political murders, equivalent in societal impact to the assassination of JFK and the Twin Towers attacks, rocked Queen Victoria and the bastions of her Empire to its core.
Various suspects were rounded up and questioned by Detective John Mallon of the Dublin Metropolitan Police including James Carey, leader of the Invincibles. Mallon’s reputation as a master of interrogation was well deserved, he never resorted to violence in dealing with suspects, but his record was impressive. He “broke” James Carey, using techniques readily recognised from modern day police procedural dramas. Carey’s evidence saw five of his Invincibles comrades executed and others imprisoned for the killings. Carey was now a marked man, a reviled villain, a turncoat to the Irish nationalist cause, and unsafe in his own country.
The following July 1883, two Irish emigrants completed a long sea journey on board the steamship Kinfauns Castle from London to Cape Town in South Africa. Donegal man Patrick O’Donnell was accompanied by his wife, and was hoping to find his fortune in the diamond mines of South Africa. He befriended a gregarious Dubliner, a James Power travelling with his wife and five children, bound for Durban in the state of Natal. Power persuaded O’Donnell to join him and so they boarded The Melrose at Cape Town for their onward journey. But all was not not what it seemed.
By the time the weekend was over, one of the two men was dead. The other was charged with murder.
What possessed O’Donnell to shoot Carey the leader of the Invincibles? Was it self-defence? Or was O’Donnell himself a Fenian assassin on a deliberate mission carrying out orders?
Tune in to TG4, Wednesday 16th March @ 9.30pm
