THE RECKONING OF

ERIN MORRIGAN

A former IRA operative faces the ghosts of her past in a final reckoning.

Feature film in production Summer 2022. All enquiries: Green Film Productions. Screenplay available on request.

In a remote safe house on the borderlands of Northern Ireland, ex-IRA volunteer, Erin Morrigan, is dying from cancer. Living alone, she self-medicates using homemade opiates, mixed with alcohol. The potent mixture causes hallucinatory flashbacks to her life as one of the ‘Unknowns’ an elite IRA unit that interrogated and killed suspected informers, burying them in the surrounding countryside. Haunted by the daily visitations from her demons, her private torment is further disturbed by the arrival of a teenaged boy, who bears a striking resemblance to one of her victims: an infiltrator whom she had once loved. The boy, a fervent New IRA recruit, is on the run after accidentally shooting a girl in a Derry riot, and needs a place to hide.

Erin allows him to stay but demands his help in return. As Erin deteriorates, the boy becomes her carer and confessor, an unready witness to her fight with the demons that relentlessly torment her. Powerless to defeat them and wanting an end to it, she orders the boy to fulfil his promise of help by shooting her. The boy refuses to do it: compelling them both to a harrowing passage as Erin fights to the last with the ghosts of her past.

This work was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/L503848/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities.