EASTER 1916 (2014) 7 x 50 mins

This major award winning seven-part historical documentary series, narrated by Brendan Gleeson and featuring dramatic reconstructions of key scenes both before and during the Rising, examines the lives of the seven men who were signatories of the 1916 Easter Proclamation and who, by doing so, made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

The seven signatories have become legendary figures in Republican and Nationalist mythology but their personal stories and the factual basis of their lives are often masked or lost in the hagiography. So who were these seven men who drafted and signed it and in doing so effectively signed their own death-warrants? Thomas J. Clarke, Sean Mac Diarmada, James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Éamonn Ceannt, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett are their respective names but this series goes in search of the men, their backgrounds and their families. Each man had his own unique story and they were a much more diverse group than is generally realised, as this important series demonstrates.

CONVICT WOMEN AND ORPHANS (2014) 4 x 50 mins

This film is a pioneering documentary series that fuses history, genealogy and dramatic reconstruction to reveal for the first time, the stories of these forgotten women and their experiences in the strange and harsh new world of Colonial Australia.  The series is the first to deal with the establishment of the enterprise that would give birth to the Australian nation and the roles that Irish females, both women and girls, played in its formation.

From 1787 to 1853, over 25,000 women, nearly half of them Irish, were transported in the dark holds of ships on a 16,000 mile journey to the other side of the world as bonded labour. Such an infusion of Irish female blood at the end of the 18th and in the 19th centuries had a telling influence on the development of colonial Australia. Neither damned whores or passive victims, these women and young girls and the hard choices they were forced to make ultimately shaped the world in which they lived.

Convict Women and Orphan Girls rescues their stories from the obscurity of the museums and archives, these founding mothers of modern Australia.