Anne Devlin
After my liberation at the end of 1806, I met with some former state prisoners on the street. They passed on without seeming to recognise me. But something like an inward agitation was visible on their faces. Although I was homeless and friendless I never troubled one of them with my distress, although I had held the lives of more than fifty of them in my hands.
– Anne Devlin
This was the last page of the journals of Anne Devlin, on which this film is loosely based. It shows her transformation from daughter of a peasant farmer to her collaboration with the rebel leader Robert Emmet in his attempt to overthrow British rule in Ireland and her final ordeal in Kilmainham Jail, where she spent long periods in solitary confinement under constant threat of execution.
Her youngest brother was kept in her cell and allowed to die before her eyes. She was driven in a covered coach to the site of Emmet’s execution and forced to witness its gory aftermath. At the same time as she was undergoing these tortures some of her former companions were endeavouring to save their lives by informing on each other.
Anne Devlin’s tenacity and courage eventually defeated the notorious Dublin Castle interrogators. At the end of 1806 they released her, broken in body but not in spirit, to a life of destitution and obscurity. This film reveals Anne Devlin as a woman of heroic stature whose voice, transcending its time and place in nineteenth century Ireland becomes the experience of all women who have endured imprisonment and torture for their beliefs.