Program Title
The Irish RM, II

Based On
The book by Somerville and Ross

Adapted By
Rosemary A Sisson

Number of Episodes:
6

Description
Further misadventures of the Irish Resident Magistrate, Major Yeates.


Original broadcast date
1986-05-25

Cast	Characters
Peter Bowles	Major Sinclair Yeates
Bryan Murray	Flurry Knox
Faith Brook	Lady Knox
Lise-Ann McLaughlin	Sally Knox
Brendan Conroy	Peter Cadogan
Anna Manahan	Mrs. Cadogan
David Kelly
Jonathan Ryan	Dr. Jerome Hickey
Diane Fletcher	Bobbie Bennett
John Kavanagh
Niall Toibin	Slipper
Sarah Badel	Babs
Virginia Cole	Briget Brickley/Cadogan
John Wells
Eamon Morrissey	Sergeant Murray
Dinsdale Landen

Credits
Executive Producer: James Mitchell
Producer: James Mitchell, Christopher Neame
Director: Roy W Baker, Peter Sykes

Intro
THE IRISH RM, II/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight we begin a new series of The Irish RM. Before anyone says, How's that again, let me recall the remark of an American critic when these stories were first published in book form in 1899. The title, he said, is meaningless.

Well, the period of this new set of stories is 1908 when King Edward VII had succeeded his mother, Victoria, and like her reigned over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland--all of Ireland. The ancient distrust between the Catholic South and the Protestant North had not yet erupted into a religious war. Irish society was a feisty mix of family and local feuds between the Irish and the Anglo-Irish, not least between the Irish and the Irish. The British had the same sort of problem on an enormous scale in say, India, between castes and tribes and languages and so on. And there, local justice was unlikely to be dispensed by the locals so they invented the institution of the RM--the Resident Magistrate--a man sent out from England to try and bring something like justice to the local benches.

Now of course, there must have been splendid resident magistrates who did exactly that and there must have been boneheads. In between, shall we say, is our man. Major Yeates, once a soldier, is fair-minded, guileless, and constantly puzzled to discover that an Englishman in Ireland is an Englishman in a foreign country. He's married now, he's settled down in the county town of Skebawn, and he's resigned to the amiable chaos of an Irish country house and a family clan, the Knoxes. The matriarch, Lady Knox, likes to think that she rules the roost, but the real squire, the subtle dictator of Skebawn and the Major's landlord, is the genial scamp Flurry Knox. To the horror of Lady Knox, Flurry has married her daughter, his own cousin. And they've just returned from their honeymoon.

The Irish RM, second series, episode one.





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