The United Irishmen Film Screening

About

Theobald Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, William Drennan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Mary Ann McCracken and many others are names that echo down the years of Irish history. These iconic and ghostly presences have become the stuff of myth and legend, of patriotic invocation and romantic aspiration.

Across the island of Ireland and beyond, there are forgotten memorials to the Society of United Irishmen to be found in village squares and at country cross-roads, in ancient graveyards and over-grown hedgerows. But the reality of what these United Irishmen both represented and achieved is often forgotten in the bloody tide of the divisive times that followed.

For, especially in the crucial decade of the 1790s, the United Irishmen movement represented – in the wake of the heady revolutionary period in both America and France – a new way of seeing the world. An inclusive commitment to the values espoused in Thomas Paine's famous "The Rights of Man" – an equal, just and secular society. In the struggle for independence from the British Crown, the movement of the United Irishmen would prove both unique and prophetic in their embrace of all sides – Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.

The United Irishman and the infamous rebellions of 1798 and 1803 were, of course, destined for failure, a failure which arguably lay the foundations for the violence that was perpetrated in Ireland until the Good Friday Agreement was signed twenty-five years ago. But now, as Irish people, of all faiths and none, attempt to find new and inclusive ways to live in harmony across the island, perhaps the story of the United Irishmen deserves re-telling?

A Yellow Asylum Films Production for X-Press Feeders

Film Screening includes a live Q & A with Writer & Director Alan Gilsenan

**Please note Down County Museum is hosting this screening. All enquiries can be sent to museums@nmandd.org **