Witch-hunt horrors on TG4
I recently wrote about the witch hunts in Boston that inspired Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which was showing at The Everyman in Cork. Now TG4 (Tuesdays 10pm and RTÉ Player) is running a six-part, semi-dramatic documentary series called
An Diabhal Inti about witch hunts in Ireland, Europe and America from the 14th to
18th centuries. The narration is in Irish and English with added English subtitles. Olwen Fouéré features as a typical vision of the female victim. The series retells the horrific stories of executions in their thousands – although witch trials were far less common in Ireland than elsewhere.
What was more pertinent here however was the persistence of tales of fairies abducting children, taking over adults, and putting changelings in their place.
A particularly shocking incidence was in 1895 in Tipperary, later recorded in Tom MacIntyre’s play What Happened Bridgie Cleary, produced in 2005.
Bridgie had been very ill for a while and her husband Michael, unhappy in his marriage, was convinced by a seanchaí that Bridgie was a changeling sent by the fairies.
Michael treated her with foul concoctions that didn’t work, before dowsing her in paraffin and setting fire to her in front of witnesses. It’s possible her horrendous death was in revenge because he believed Bridgie was unfaithful, but the fairy stories played a major role.