RTÉ’s acclaimed documentary series continues this week with the Fenian Fire, a historical investigative documentary about a supposed Irish plot to assassinate Queen Victoria in 1887. This plot was actually master-minded by British intelligence with the sanction of the then Prime Minister Lord Salisbury in an attempt to undermine Charles Stewart Parnell and the cause of Home Rule in Ireland.
In an eerie forerunner of contemporary events, Irish-American bombers waged a five-year campaign of dynamite attacks on British cities at the end of the nineteenth century. This supposedly was to culminate in a spectacular attempt on the life of Queen Victoria in the infamous “Jubilee Plot”.
However, journalist Christy Campbell (former defence correspondent with The Sunday Telegraph and also author of “The Maharajah’s Box” and “Phylloxera”) recently uncovered newly-released Home Office files which revealed the workings of a sophisticated counter-terrorism operation which infiltrated the Irish revolutionary movement and planned the “Jubilee Plot” which was to undermine the entire cause of Home Rule in Ireland forever and herald the demise of Charles Stewart Parnell.
This true story takes us from famine-stricken Ireland to New York, from Mexico City to Paris, from London to Chicago, and features an extraordinary range of bizarre and fascinating characters and has all the twists and turns of a John Le Carre thriller.
Alongside Parnell, these characters include John Devoy, the exiled IRB revolutionary and journalist who was a key member of Clann na Gael; Brigadier-General Frederick Millen, a Tyrone-born soldier of fortune who joined the Fenian Brotherhood in Mexico City but turned finally traitor and informer with British intelligence; Lord Salisbury, the aristocratic Tory Prime Minister who was passionate and ruthless Unionist; Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, the legendary US-exiled revolutionary who launched dynamite attacks on London in 1881; and James Munro, Inspector-General of British police and later head of the first British Intelligence Service but who ended his days as a missionary in Bengal.
But the story is also an intimate and colourful insight into an oft-forgotten era of the Irish struggle for independence.
The documentary draws on Campbell’s research and the newly released papers in the Public Records Office at Kew, as well as a vast photographic and document archive.