The time is the late summer of 1798. The place is called Murrisk, near Westport in the extreme West of Ireland. It is the day of the annual Papist pilgrimage to the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick but the Prestons are enjoying a picnic on Bartra Head, a low neck of land which juts out into Clew Bay just below the
mountain itself. There’s Bonaventure Preston, the Master of Murrisk Abbey and his brother Captain John Preston recently retired from the navy and Jamaica. There’s Pamela,
Bonaventure’s daughter and heiress and her friend Margaret O’Reilly. There, too, are Brendan O’Reilly recently called to the Bar and Stephen Allen, the factotum at Murrisk Abbey.
Happily the recent rebellion of the United Irishmen in the East of the country has not disturbed the easy-going pace of life in the West although there are constant rumours and alarms about a possible invasion by the ever-threatening French. But the weather is fine, the hay is saved and Margaret is soon to be married.
Then suddenly the picnic party is disturbed by the insistent tolling of the bell at Murrisk Abbey. Brendan could never forget the details of that day and what turned out to be the watershed between the lazy pleasures of his youth and all the troubles that were to follow.
On 22nd August 1798 General Humbert arrived off Killala just 30 miles away with a flotilla of three frigates and landed a thousand battle-hardened sons of the French revolution in north Mayo.
UNION traces the story of the picnic party through the subsequent anarchy in the west of Ireland, the political corruption employed to secure the fateful Act of Union with Great Britain in 1800 and the final dénouement of Robert Emmet’s ‘Rising’ on 23rd July 1803.