1 x 60’ – IRISH TV (2016)
Northern Ireland’s leading historian Dr. Eamonn Phoenix walks in the footsteps of the men and women who wound the clock leading to the Easter Rising.
This film includes a portrait of Dubliner Edward Carson the creation of whose anti Home Rule Ulster Volunteer Force prompted the formation of Eoin Mac Neil’s Irish Volunteers (Force).
Phoenix literally geographically walks across the northern counties capturing the spirit of the key players from both sides of the community who had a hand in the shaping and making of 1916.
He brings us into the environs and minds of dissident Protestants FJ Bigger (IRB), Ernest Blythe, Bulmer Hobson (IRB), Ballymena man Jack White (founder of the Irish Citizens Army) and Roger Casement the British diplomat turned rebel gunrunner hanged in London for treason.
Dr Phoenix returns to the homesteads, villages towns, and schools out of which James Connolly, Eóin Mac Néill, John MacBride, Sean MacDiarmada, Tom Clarke, Sean MacEntee and Denis McCullough emerged.
In this compelling narrative – backed up by original documents, records and input from fellow historians, Dr Diarmaid Ferriter, Jim McDermott, Dr Margaret Ward, Dr Gerard McAtasney, Michael McDowell SC and John Gray – Dr Phoenix cogently illustrates without Northerners, there would not have been a Rising.
Editor: David Gray
