Wearing of the Green - The Girl From County Mayo

WEARING OF THE GREEN - THE IRISH GIRL SYNOPSIS: With the recent successes of the American and French revolutions, dreams of freedom against occupation and oppression spread across the globe. In spite of the growing unrest, the British Empire continues to rule their remaining colonies with an even heavier hand. Particularly their dominion over Ireland. Subjecting the Irish to soul-crushing Penal Laws while forcing them to swear oaths of loyalty and affection to a foreign King and convert to his Protestant faith, was simply a demand untenable for the devoutly Catholic country. Their religion and education is outlawed and their priests are hunted, then hanged or exiled. Their property is seized and given to Protestant immigrants from Scotland and England. Left impoverished, uneducated and despised by their rulers, seeds of a burgeoning uprising are being planted across the Emerald Isle. The sign of resistance is the color green. To wear or display it in public is treason punishable by death. This is the story of one Irish woman’s transformation from servant to master of her own destiny in the days leading up to the Irish Uprising of 1798. It is undeniable that what the British did to REANNA O’NEIL is inhumane...but what she did to them is history. Born in 1777 into a life of poverty, servitude and compliance, Reanna grew up under the heel of the British boot knowing little else of the world. Married at sixteen and widowed at twenty after a lecherous British officer’s horse trampled her protective husband to death, she faces life alone as a single, unmarriageable mother, fighting to feed her young daughter and elderly parents. In a world not of her own making, she willingly sacrifices everything but her dignity for them, slaving brutal 18-hour days at Crofton Manor, an estate owned by a ruthless British aristocrat. In return for her misery and servitude, her impoverished family are permitted to be tenant farmers living in a hut on the estate, to cultivate the land for Lord Crofton. After a dinner party one night, the GOOD LORD master of the house deals Reanna the final, unimaginable indignity, Attacking and brutalizing her in a drunken rage. Fighting back in hysterical terror and horror, she unintentionally killS him and her life as she knows it is over. Consumed by terror, guilt and shame, she flees home on foot only to discover soldiers galloping away, her family slaughtered in their beds and her home ablaze. She escapes to her parish priest’s home to beg for absolution for her sin and sanctuary, but the terrified cleric throws her back out into the storm to fend for herself. "I'll not be going to the gallows with ya for a crime I had no part in, O’Neil! Pray the good Lord sees fit to have mercy on us all for the trouble your shameful sin has brought to us!" Denied sanctuary and doggedly pursued by CAPTAIN TREDWELL, a sadistic British Officer who’s hot on her heels and “determined to make the Irish slattern pay”, she’s forced to flee east on foot through dangerous Orange Protestant strongholds to reach her estranged sister in Ulster. Witnessing further cruelty, injustice and humiliation heaped upon her countrymen in the east, she can stomach no more and screams in anger at her god..."I be going to hell for what I done already, but the devil can't have me 'til I do what needs doing first". Determined to evade the hangman until then, this young woman’s transformation begins when she summons the courage to stop running, and helps rebel leader Theodore Wolfe-Tone fund and prepare an invasion of Ireland by Napoleon Bonaparte’s French forces in support of the planned Irish uprising. To this end Reanna becomes a spy, thief and rebel leading a group of desperate teens into battle against heavily armed British soldiers sent by England to quash “The Irish Problem”. The rebels have many victories against insurmountable odds, but as fate would have it, the Irish Uprising of 1798 ultimately fails when thousands of British reinforcements storm Ireland's shores to exact revenge for their losses from the French and the Irish. She manages to escape the massacres of retribution and the French invasion and uprising fails. When Wolfe-Tone is captured and executed, Reanna takes up the mantle of war and continues the fight, determined to avenge her people and exact revenge on the man who slaughtered her family for the crime she committed in self defense. By confronting and challenging her world, Reanna O’Neil transforms herself through determination, will and faith, from life as a servant to a warrior and integral part of the fight for Irish independence and freedom from foreign rule.