Sir,—Sylvie Kleinman reviewed (HI 34.1, Jan./Feb. 2026, pp 52–3) Netflix’s titillating but, to my mind, historically absurd—at least in relation to the Fenians—series, House of Guinness. She believes that viewers are ‘edified’ that we are treated to a ‘committed, principled and fabricated Fenian babe [my emphasis] activist Ellen’. I certainly wasn’t. I know that it’s fictionalised and I understand that in historical fiction the writer may interpolate and extrapolate and even invent.
I don’t mean to be churlish, but even if one accepts the young woman, Ellen, as the brains behind the Fenian movement and her brother, its supposed leader, as an unthinking dolt, does not Ellen’s boast at the end of the first episode that the Fenians are, like Mafiosi, shaking down Dublin brothels make her just that little bit less principled and merit a mention? Or that the Fenians are depicted as leprechauns wearing green sashes and hats while rioting? Sorry, but the Fenians were serious revolutionaries. Even the British government, which had many Fenians killed, and transported and imprisoned many, many more, never made that claim about shaking down brothels.
The final episode of the series makes reference to the ship, the Cuba, about to arrive in New York. In 1871 the Cuba did, in fact, arrive in New York with the amnestied John Devoy, O’Donovan Rossa and others. Given what is in the first, I tremble to think what the second series will have them doing, perhaps even organising an impossible rescue attempt of their brothers in Australia.—Yours etc.,
FRANK MAC GABHANN
Skerries