Work Text:
In the autumn of 1965, a damp wind curled in from the Irish Sea and rattled through the hedgerows of County Wicklow, where a quiet farmhouse had been hastily converted into a temporary production office. The crew—mostly American, with a few bemused Irish technicians trailing behind—had come to shoot what was initially a light-hearted sitcom for RTÉ. It was to be called Sister, Brother, a modest family comedy centered on Maggie Donnelly, a spirited Derry widow raising three children amidst the boisterous chaos of her extended family, and her younger brother Seamus, a dreamy philosophy student who’d defected south to University College Cork in search of answers, freedom, and a girl named Niamh who played the harp barefoot at protests.
At first, it had all seemed delightfully straightforward. The American showrunner, Leonard "Lenny" Harper, was a Brooklyn-born former theater director known for a wry touch and a nose for talent. He’d once directed off-Broadway productions of Beckett and Wilde and had a long-standing affection for Ireland born from whiskey and his Cork-born landlady in New York. Lenny had brought with him an ambitious young cinematographer named Hal Granger—who insisted on natural lighting even in the rain—and a pair of UCLA writers who'd cut their teeth on Los Angeles’ rapidly maturing soap scene.
The sitcom’s early scripts were whimsical, full of the expected bickering and mismatched values between Maggie’s loud, multigenerational household and Seamus’s pensive, university-bound musings. There were gags about turf fires and vinyl records, about young Maggie Donnelly Jr. discovering Marxism from her uncle’s pamphlets, and middle son Colm chasing after Protestant girls in the park because “they walk like they own the ground.”
But history would not wait politely behind the camera.
In February 1966, the long-discussed referendum on reunification stunned nearly everyone when it passed with a solid majority—north and south. Celebrations erupted across the island, cautious at first but growing rapidly into a tide of euphoric, sometimes chaotic hope. There were parades in Newry and Cork, weeping veterans in Donegal, songs revived from the War of Independence ringing out beside modern ballads calling for unity, language, and a new Irish future. American news crews showed up overnight. CBS called Lenny to say they were bumping their investment, and RTÉ all but begged him to retool Sister, Brother as something worthy of a new nation.
And so the project changed.
The sitcom was shelved. In its place would rise Green and Rising, a televised drama described in press materials as “a family saga unfolding in the first breaths of a reunited Ireland.” No longer framed for laughs and canned applause, it was reconceived as a semi-serialized, hour-long television film to serve as both pilot and national moment.
Lenny and his team relocated to a manor house outside Kells, transforming the site into a hybrid studio location where wood-paneled dining rooms were dressed as war rooms, and bedrooms became cramped Derry flats. New characters were added, others recast. Maggie Donnelly remained, now a war widow and nurse, her role given greater gravity and depth. Veteran Abbey Theatre actress Síofra Brennan was brought in for the part—fifty-one and imperious, with a regal bearing and the wit of a stiletto. Her Maggie had lost two brothers to the Border Troubles and yet kept her children’s coats stitched and school shoes polished. Her brother Seamus was now a civil servant in Dublin’s reunification commission, not a student—played by golden-voiced American-Irish actor Frankey Mahon, who’d left Hollywood in protest of the Vietnam draft.
The show’s central tension pivoted from petty sibling squabbles to a deeper meditation on how families stitched together fractured identities. The Donnellys were Catholic, yes, but now with cousins returned from Canada, neighbors from Protestant enclaves seeking dialogue, and a stubborn aunt who still insisted on referring to Northern roads by their old British designations.
The pilot film aired on the evening of October 3rd, 1966.
It began with a slow pan across the River Foyle, mist curling across the water, Maggie walking alone with a bundle of firewood as a radio played archival speeches from the vote count. The first line of dialogue—delivered without flourish—was: “They say we’re one country now, but nobody sent word to the weather.”
The reception was rapturous.
Families watched in communal halls. In Derry, pubs paused the football to broadcast it. In Belfast, it was projected onto the side of a building in the Short Strand. Even in London, Irish expatriates gathered at the Irish Centre in Camden to watch a grainy bootleg shipped ahead via ferry.
Green and Rising became more than television. It was history breathing in real time—an artifact born mid-pulse. It would later be called the first fictional voice of a united Ireland.
The pilot’s narrative centered around the return of Seamus to Derry for the first time since the referendum. A dinner scene halfway through—one of the few lifted wholesale from the original sitcom concept—found Maggie’s youngest son, ten-year-old Liam, asking earnestly, “Uncle, are we still North?” Seamus hesitates, then says, “We’re still Donnellys. That’s the bit that stays.” His voice cracked just slightly, and the camera caught Maggie squeezing her son’s hand beneath the table.
Though the full series wouldn’t air until the following spring of 1967, Green and Rising made its mark. American networks paid attention. Foreign directors signed on to RTÉ dramas, and Irish actors who once scraped for bit parts in London found themselves headlining homegrown prestige works. The cast would go on to win the inaugural All-Ireland Television Awards—colloquially called “The Reels”—with Síofra Brennan earning the first Best Performance for her nuanced portrayal of maternal resolve and quiet rebellion.
And Lenny Harper?
He never went back to New York. He bought a stone cottage near Kells, grew fond of brown bread, and said things like “sláinte” in a woeful accent nobody had the heart to correct. In 1971, he married the show’s costume designer, Deirdre O’Connell, who had once thrown a spool of thread at him for asking her to “make the uniforms pop more.”
Together, they made a home where fiction had once been made real.
Green and Rising ran for twelve years, from 1966 to 1978, a record-breaking run in Irish television that transformed it from a cultural experiment into a national institution. What began as a post-referendum drama evolved into a sprawling, intimate chronicle of Ireland’s reunified generation—one that aged with its audience, reflecting not just social change but the quiet victories and ruptures of everyday life.
Through the 1970s, the show deepened. Its writers tackled the realities of nation-building: clashes over land reform, language policy, emigration, reconciliation with Unionist neighbors, even the growing feminist movement. The Donnellys remained the emotional anchor, with Maggie’s children growing into adulthood, taking on new roles—civil servant, teacher, rebel poet, nun. Meanwhile, Maggie herself aged gracefully into a kind of national matriarch. Síofra Brennan’s subtle performance made her not just a character but a collective memory—viewers would often say, Maggie reminds me of my own mother, only with better lines.
The show’s format changed too. By season seven, it adopted a semi-serial storytelling rhythm, with arcs running two to five episodes long. A side character introduced in season four—Roísín Flynn, a Protestant convert to Catholicism who ran a rural bookstore—became one of its most popular figures. Her romance with Donnelly middle child Eamon became a years-spanning slow burn that would culminate in a 1974 wedding special that broke viewership records.
But by 1978, the core cast had aged, several actors had left for stage or foreign television, and the writers found themselves creatively exhausted. The twelfth season ended with a powerful but quiet finale—Maggie, now a grandmother, sitting in the old Donnelly kitchen with a new generation of children at her feet, retelling the story of the night the country changed. As the screen faded to black, she looked straight into the camera and said, “The country rose. We all did. But don’t forget, it was built right here—around the fire.”
The credits rolled without music.
RTÉ declared it the final season, and Ireland mourned like it was a wake. Newspapers ran retrospectives. Schoolchildren staged amateur reenactments. Libraries hosted "Donnelly Dialogues" to discuss the show's impact on the modern Irish identity.
But just five years later, in 1983, whispers began to circulate.
A mysterious US backer—later revealed to be Boston billionaire and Irish-American philanthropist Harold Fenwick, whose own mother had hailed from County Clare—approached RTÉ with a staggering offer: full financial support for a revival season. He had spent years watching Green and Rising on VHS in his Manhattan penthouse, convinced it had told the “true story of a people becoming themselves.” With Irish television under pressure to compete with the flashier, commercialized imports flooding the airwaves, the offer was impossible to refuse.
RTÉ scrambled. Scripts were hurriedly written. New sets were constructed in haste, and the long-dormant studio outside Kells was reopened with much fanfare and fumbling. It was the first Irish series to benefit from transatlantic funding, and it showed—new camera equipment, a modernized score, even colour grading assistance from New York technicians.
Season 13 premiered on Christmas Day, 1983.
Critics were skeptical. Older fans were protective. But the first scene—an adult Liam Donnelly (played now by theatre actor Peter Kelleher) returning from London with a young Black wife, Gloria, and a quiet toddler in tow—was hailed as both bold and true. The Ireland of 1983 wasn’t the Ireland of 1966. And Green and Rising had returned to show that the dream of unity still had growing pains.
Maggie had passed in-universe two years before the revival, but she was never far from the story. Flashbacks, letters, even an unused tape recorded by Síofra Brennan before her death in 1982 would be played in the season 14 Christmas special. Her ghost—never literal—hovered over the kitchen table scenes like a memory in lace.
The revived series ran for four more seasons, finally ending in 1987 with a two-hour finale watched by over three million people across Ireland, Britain, and expatriate circles in Boston, Melbourne, and Johannesburg. It was titled “That Which Rises”, and it brought the Donnelly family together one last time for a wedding—Eamon and Roísín’s youngest son marrying his long-time partner, a soft-spoken Protestant nurse named David from Antrim.
In the final scene, the family gathered once again in the Donnelly kitchen, now renovated but still familiar, to take a group photo. As the camera clicked, the image froze—not the polished, posed one, but the split-second before, when everyone was still laughing.
Over black, Maggie’s voice echoed one last time: “No one ever really leaves the kitchen. That’s where we find each other. Always.”
Legacy:
Today, Green and Rising is considered a cornerstone of Irish cultural history. Reruns air on RTÉ Gold. The full series was restored and released on Blu-Ray in 2012, with a 300-page companion volume titled Homefires: The Oral History of Green and Rising. Scholars cite it as the first truly national fictional work in post-partition Ireland. It is studied in universities, quoted in wedding speeches, and remembered in the names of cafés from Cork to Derry: Maggie’s Kitchen. The Rising Café. Donnelly’s Hearth.
And every now and then, in some quiet corner of the country, you’ll still hear someone mutter before dinner, with a small smile:
"We’re still Donnellys. That’s the bit that stays."
The most dramatic and artistically ambitious arc in Green and Rising’s long and storied run came during its original tenure in 1975, as part of its tenth season—a three-part special known collectively as "The Year of Smoke." These episodes departed radically from the show’s typical tone and format. Gone was the warm intimacy of the Donnelly kitchen, the affectionate teasing and gentle realism of family life. Instead, Green and Rising plunged, unflinchingly and without narration, into the most divisive chapter of Ireland’s 20th century: the War of Independence and the subsequent Civil War.
It began with Maggie’s youngest daughter, Mary Donnelly—by then a young teacher and newly passionate about family history—uncovering an old cigar box in the attic. Inside were yellowed telegrams, a pressed armband, and a photograph marked Donnelly 1921—a man who bore an eerie resemblance to her uncle Seamus. When she brought the box down to the family table, her grandmother, once a minor character, now elderly and nearly silent in the modern storyline, whispered the name “Máirtín,” and the screen faded into sepia-toned silence.
Part I: “Ashes in the House”
The first episode opens in 1919 with a close-up of a bread knife scraping against burnt crust—an ordinary, almost soothing sound, until the shot widens to show a bare kitchen and a boy of eighteen cleaning a rifle beneath the table. This boy, Máirtín Donnelly, would become the heart of the flashback arc. Played by rising stage actor Fiachra Nealon, Máirtín was a composite of stories sourced from journals, interviews, and rural oral histories painstakingly collected by the writing team in the years leading up to production.
This episode followed Máirtín, a postman in Donegal, who by day carried letters and by night relayed coded messages between IRA safe houses and the Dáil’s provisional representatives. He wasn’t a warrior by nature. He’d been a poet, had a fondness for fiddle tunes, and was once arrested for sketching British officers in a bar “too accurately.” But his village was raided one afternoon, and his older brother arrested without cause. From that moment, his life curved toward inevitability.
What distinguished “Ashes in the House” was its depiction of moral compromise. Máirtín’s unit—barely trained, mostly farmers—raided a British convoy in the second act, resulting in the death of a young constable who had just announced his resignation. There were no heroics, no swelling music. Just the breathless silence of violence done badly, clumsily, and with lasting consequence.
Part II: “The Split”
The second episode jumped forward to 1922, after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Máirtín returned to a fractured Ireland. Some in his village called him a traitor for accepting the new state; others, still underground, warned him he’d been marked by former comrades. The Civil War was beginning—not in declarations, but in the unspoken dread that crept into every hearth and whisper.
Here, the character of Michael Collins appeared in a supporting role, in a brief scene during Máirtín’s journey to Dublin to hand over intelligence documents to the Free State Army. The casting was unconventional: Collins was portrayed by a man named Patrick Hanratty, a hotel cook from Bundoran in County Donegal, who had never acted before and never would again. Lenny Harper—by then semi-retired but still creatively advising—had met him while staying at the hotel for a wedding. Hanratty had served them bacon the morning after, told a story about his grandfather’s time in prison with Collins, and spoke with a cadence and conviction that made Lenny pause mid-chew.
After some gentle convincing and several pints, Hanratty agreed to a screen test. It was grainy, unfocused, but undeniable. He looked nothing like the Collins of statues and postcards—he was softer, slighter, his accent thicker—but when he looked across the table and said, “We’re burnin’ the map, boy, hopin’ we remember the road,” even the crew went silent.
His scene lasted barely five minutes. It took place in a cluttered office, Collins pacing, reviewing maps, his eyes hollow with exhaustion. Máirtín offers him names, locations. Collins listens, then pushes a biscuit tin toward him—inside, documents, keys, and a revolver.
“Do you think it’s worth it?” Máirtín asks quietly.
Collins doesn’t answer. He just nods toward the revolver and says, “Take it. You’ll know what for when it’s too late to refuse.”
Hanratty returned to his hotel the next day. He never pursued acting again. When asked years later why he hadn’t, he simply replied, “I’d no other story in me.”
Part III: “Gravel and Grace”
The final episode of the arc returned to Donegal. Máirtín had deserted the army. He was hiding in the hills, surviving on barley and scraps from sympathetic neighbors, haunted by the men he had betrayed and the ones he had refused to kill. One scene, remembered as among the most harrowing in Irish television, showed Máirtín coming face to face with his boyhood friend, now a diehard anti-Treaty sniper. They do not speak. They share a loaf of bread beneath the ruins of a burned chapel. When they part ways, the friend says, “I’ll miss you when I shoot you.”
The story ends with Máirtín returning to his family farm. His mother is dying. The land is in ruin. The government considers him a deserter; his former friends call him a coward. He plants potatoes anyway. Life, the episode implies, does not wait for truth to be sorted out.
Reception and Legacy
The Year of Smoke arc aired over three consecutive Sundays in November 1975. There were no commercials. RTÉ issued a brief advisory: “This program draws from history. It does not claim to settle it.” Even so, it sparked fierce national debate. Newspapers published essays, veterans' groups issued conflicting statements, and pubs became impromptu forums for argument and remembrance.
The younger audience, many of whom had grown up with Green and Rising, were stunned by the shift. But most agreed it was the show’s finest hour. For a drama known for sentiment and hearth, it had dared to enter the flame of national trauma and emerged scorched but unbroken.
In the years that followed, The Year of Smoke would be taught in secondary school history classes alongside primary documents. Fiachra Nealon was nominated for a BAFTA. Patrick Hanratty received a fan letter from the president. When he died in 1999, RTÉ aired his five-minute scene in full, uninterrupted.
And the final words of Máirtín Donnelly, sitting in the last shot with a shovel in his lap, remain etched in the memory of those who watched:
“I fought for Ireland. But I live in her now, and she don’t ask for stories. Just planting.”
The screen faded to black. No music. Only the sound of wind over stone.
Tearjerker Moments from Across Green and Rising, Original and Revival (1966–1987)
Over its 21-year run, Green and Rising became synonymous not just with national identity and dramatic storytelling but with moments that struck deep, cathartic chords in the hearts of its viewers. It didn’t traffic in melodrama. Its heartbreaks were earned—quiet devastations, familial ruptures, and moments of resilience so fragile they felt sacred. Here is a selection of some of the most unforgettable tearjerker moments from both its original and revival series.
1967 – Season 1, Episode 4: “The Letterbox”
Little Colm Donnelly, aged nine, waits each morning by the gate for a letter from his father, who had moved to Glasgow for work during the late ‘50s. Maggie had told the children he would write “when he could.” In truth, he had left long before the series began and would never return.
One misty morning, Colm receives a letter from Scotland. He bursts into the kitchen, beaming, shouting, “Mam! He wrote! He wrote to me!”
Maggie reads the letter silently, her expression unreadable. After a beat, she kneels before Colm and gently says, “This is from your Uncle Brendan, love. He just signed it... because he thought you’d like to see the handwriting.”
Colm doesn’t cry. He folds the letter carefully and puts it in his coat pocket. The final scene shows him walking to school, slower than usual, clutching the letter like a secret talisman.
1970 – Season 4, Episode 6: “The Feast of St. Brigid”
In one of the show’s most praised episodes, Maggie hosts a traditional feast with the whole family present. The power cuts out midway, and they finish dinner by candlelight, singing old songs. As the children drift off to sleep, Maggie and Seamus sit at the kitchen table and speak softly of their mother—long passed—and how, when they were children, she would place a piece of bread on the windowsill each St. Brigid’s night “in case the saint herself came in.”
Seamus, usually witty and composed, begins to weep quietly.
“I never saw her cry,” he says. “Not even when Da died. But the bread was always there.”
1973 – Season 7, Episode 3: “The Ferrywoman”
When Seamus brings home a woman he loves—a Protestant journalist from Antrim named Eliza—Maggie receives her warmly. But Aunt Maura, the elder of the household and a conservative firebrand, refuses to eat at the same table.
The night ends in silence, with Eliza quietly helping Maggie wash dishes.
“Some women fight wars,” Eliza says softly, “but I feel like I keep surviving other people’s.” Maggie turns and wipes her cheek with a dishcloth, murmuring, “You're not the first woman to feel that. But you’re the first to say it.”
The episode ends with Maura placing a tiny photo of her own long-dead Protestant childhood friend into the fire, watching it burn.
1975 – Season 10, Episode 12: “The Year of Smoke – Part III”
Máirtín Donnelly returns home after the Civil War to find his mother, now frail, barely able to stand. He kneels by her bed, covered in mud, and she whispers his name. She lifts a shaking hand to his cheek and says, “You were always gentle. That’s what scared me.”
She passes in the night. Máirtín buries her the next morning alone. No one from the town comes. As he lowers her into the ground, he begins reciting a prayer, but forgets the words. He kneels, unable to finish, and instead sings a lullaby she used to hum to him as a child.
This moment, accompanied only by the sound of soft wind and crows, left millions in tears.
1978 – Season 12, Episode 13: “Last Light” (Original Series Finale)
Maggie, now elderly, gathers her grown children and grandchildren for a meal. Each family member has returned—Seamus from Dublin, Colm from Birmingham, Mary from a convent. She serves them stew, laughs at old jokes, and even dances a few steps with her grandson Liam.
Later that night, she sits alone by the hearth. She takes out a box of letters—some from family, some never sent. She burns them one by one, smiling, saying aloud, “You don't need to explain yourself to the fire. It listens anyway.”
As the fire dims, she nods off in her chair. The camera lingers on the flickering embers, then pans slowly over the empty kitchen. The credits roll in silence.
Viewers flooded RTÉ with messages, many saying it felt as though they had lost a real family member.
1984 – Season 14, Episode 7: “Liam and Gloria”
Liam Donnelly, now grown and returned from London with his Black American wife Gloria and their son Micah, is confronted by an old friend from the village who asks—without malice—“How do you expect the lad to understand who he is with such confusion?”
That night, Gloria finds Liam standing in the field behind the house, staring at the old tree they used to climb as children. He says softly, “I can’t protect him from it. From their doubts, their ignorance. But I can raise him here. Where I became myself. I want him to have a place that won't be ashamed of his roots—or his branches.”
They kiss under the tree, the boy sleeping peacefully inside.
1985 – Season 15, Episode 10: “Roísín’s Silence”
Roísín Flynn, now in her sixties and long since widowed, begins to suffer from aphasia after a mild stroke. The episode follows her attempts to communicate with her daughter-in-law through drawings, fragments of hymns, and touch.
In the final scene, Roísín is taken to a familiar hill where she and her late husband once picnicked. As the wind sweeps through the grass, she whispers the name “Eamon”—her only clear word of the episode.
She smiles. The wind lifts her scarf. And for a moment, she seems to hear him answer.
1987 – Season 17, Episode 13: “That Which Rises” (Finale of the Revival)
As the extended Donnelly family assembles for a wedding, Liam and his teenage son Micah walk through the old Donnelly house, now restored. They pass the kitchen table, the old hearth, the staircase carved with initials.
Micah asks, “Was she real? Your Mam?”
Liam nods, touches the old kettle, and says, “More real than I’ve ever managed to be.”
In the final minutes, the family poses for a photograph. Everyone laughs, out of sync, someone bumps a lamp. The photographer shouts, “Hold still!”
But it’s the moment before the stillness that’s captured—the tangle of arms, someone tickling someone else, a baby fussing, Colm wiping his eyes, and Seamus raising his glass.
The screen freezes.
Then, in a recording preserved from 1977, Maggie’s voice plays one last time:
“We were many things. Poor, hopeful, stubborn. But we were never alone, were we? Not once. Not here.”
The screen fades to black.
Cultural Reverberations
For decades after Green and Rising ended, these moments were quoted at funerals and weddings alike. Lines like “The fire listens anyway” and “Where I became myself” entered Irish idiom. Schoolchildren reenacted The Year of Smoke. Mothers named their daughters Roísín. Sons tried to grow into the gentleness of Máirtín Donnelly.
And in kitchens across the country, late at night, with the kettle just off the boil, more than a few people admitted—quietly, sheepishly—that they missed the Donnellys still.
And always would.