The Hanging Gale

The Hanging Gale is a four-episode television serial which first aired on RTÉ One (Republic of Ireland) and BBC1 (United Kingdom) in 1995. The series was a British–Irish co-production, made by Little Bird Films for BBC Northern Ireland in association with Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), with support from the Irish Film Board. The serial, set in 1846 in County Donegal in the west of Ulster at the beginning of Ireland's Great Famine, starred the four McGann brothers: Joe McGann, Paul McGann, Mark McGann and Stephen McGann, and was based on an original idea by Joe and Stephen McGann while researching their family's history. The title of the series comes from the term 'hanging gale', the name for a widespread practice in Ireland at the time, where a landlord would allow new tenants a six-month grace period on payment of their rent, with the expectation that the rent owed would be paid when the land's crops were harvested and sold. Plot Under pressure to pay rental arrears, members of a secret society convict land agent Henry Jenkins in a "hedgerow trial" and brutally execute him, also murdering his coach driver. The replacement agent, Captain William Townsend (Michael Kitchen), soon arrives and begins reviewing papers and investigating the state of affairs of both the land and tenants. Within minutes he is attacked by a mob who demand an audience. After agreeing to see a group of three only on the following day, he narrowly avoids being lynched when the conversation doesn't go the way the tenants would like. He is rescued by British soldiers.