Search Results for 'Changeling'

Come away, O human child!

Come away, O human child!

ONE OF the most sensational murder trials in late 19th century Ireland was that of Bridget Cleary in 1895, who was burned alive by her husband and cousins, who sincerely believed she was a ‘changeling’.

Remarkably, and that is a word already used in this drama, the court accepted Michael Cleary’s plea of manslaughter. He was charged with the murder of his wife Bridget by burning her to death, but the jury accepted that Cleary had really believed that his wife had been transformed into a ‘changeling’ by the fairies; and it was only a concoction of herbs and fire that would release her from its spell.

When the Kilkenny essayist Herbert Butler came to write about the burning of Bridget Cleary in 1960 he acknowledged that Slievenaman was always known for its mysterious past. Looking across the Tipperary border from his fields, he described it as ‘a pale blue hump with the soft, rounded contours of ancient hills whose roughness have been smoothed away by time. Finn MacCool lived there as did Oisin and Oscar, and 50 beautiful maidens, who gave it its name The Mountain of Women.’ In Bridget Cleary’s time, it was also the home of Denis Ganey, the local herbal doctor, and a man respected and feared for his knowledge of fairylore. It was to this house that Michael Cleary ran to on the afternoon of Thursday March 14 1895. He pleaded for a cure for his wife whom he believed had been taken by the fairies, and replaced by a woman that was not the Bridget Boland he had married.

The powerful true story of the courageous woman who was the first to stand up to the corrupt Los Angeles Police Department in the 1920s, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, is an intensely emotional experience that is hard to watch and hard to stop watching all in the same breath.

HUNGER, THE acclaimed film focusing on the last weeks in the life of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands MP will be shown when the Cinemobile visits Portumna this weekend.