THE FALL OF ABEL

By Daniel MacCarthy

Daniel’s historical narrative epic, The Fall of Abel, is currently being optioned for film rights.

"Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."
Genesis 12:1-3

THOMOND 1798

One brother sworn to the freedom of an ancient Irish homeland and a young American Republic, another brother bound to the British Empire and a family dynasty. Their two lives, loyalties and loves at odds with each other where only one can prevail.

Out of the inevitable conflict to come, both bloodlines are forever marked by the descent from their Irish Eden to the hell of the Great Famine. It carries them across the Atlantic once more in the greatest exodus of the industrial age and brings their line to a final reckoning during the carnage of the American Civil War where redemption awaits.

Following on from the earliest waves of European settlement in the Americas, this powerful drama follows the gripping fortunes, love both impulsive and profound, and the revolutionary world of the aristocratic and fragmented Dillon family of Thomond and two buccaneering sons, Gabriel and Thomas. Their diverged paths, one dedicated to country, the other to family, blazes unstoppable trails across a smouldering Ireland in the wake of the defeat of the revolution and the United Men at Vinegar Hill to the triumph of the imperial forces at the Battle of Waterloo.

Against the backdrop of a coerced Act of Union which harpooned Ireland like a fasted fish to the British mothership, the steadfast Thomas, who believed his older brother dead after a three year absence since the failed rebellion takes protectively the hand of Christine Mahon, Gabriel’s fiancee, who he knew had suffered the vengeance of Gabriel’s nemesis Major Vandeville which had led to her being with the child Lochlinn. Gabriel himself was to find love with Eibhlín Dubh Larkin who had lost all her family in Kildare during the uprising. They find sanctuary in her mother’s lands in Brittany and begin their own family.

"And the numbered Sons of Perdition did find their own in the Promised land……."

SOUTH STREET SEAPORT

NEW YORK 1848

Jack Dillon had been smuggled to America soon after his famous Westminster declaration as part of a funding drive for the new Young Irelander rebellion to come and relays the full devastation of the slaughter in Ireland to wide audiences. Natives need only look towards the teeming numbers pouring through the New York ports to gauge the extent of the disaster. Jack was to become known later in history as the Irish Mandella, and very much his uncle’s nephew, rather than his father Thomas’ son.

In a teeming, whirl pool of human energy that is now the rapidly expanding city of New York, Jack is emotionally reunited with a de facto leader of the Irish in the new world, his dashing cousin Michael Dillon who is more part of the old money and social scene of an earlier New York than the new currency fighting for neighbourhood streets. Michael’s role as a boy child volunteer alongside his father Colonel Gabriel Dillon and the Choctaw leader Moshala in the lines of Jackson’s immortal defence of New Orleans against the Imperial forces following his rescue from the wily Lady Olivia Vandeville’s scheme to have him secretly indentured from Ireland to the deathly swamplands of Louisiana, had given him a legendary status amongst both Native Yankees and his own people.

It was Jack who put his arms around his cousin Michael as children and tried to loosen the ropes that pinned him to the croppy pumps during a mock trial by the local British authorities of Gabriel Dillon, who in abstentia, had to learn how his son was flogged in his stead as a warning to all who would resist the Crown of Britain. Michael recalled how Jack’s eyes were synged by tears at his cousin’s distressed plight. Michael in his agony was to regard such actions with the deepest bonds of soulful regard in the years ahead.

They celebrated their reunion heartily in New York and they became a noted and formidable duo in the city and were observed not only in Washington but by agents from further afield. Shane O’Neill, Gabriel’s trusted friend and comrade of yore had accompanied Jack on his tour but was also left with orders by the Young Irelander command – see to it that Jack remains in the States for he was deemed in spite of his willingness, more a man of politics, than of war and would be of strategic value to the movement as a figurehead in the new Ireland. However an opportunity arises for Michael to return in his stead….

Out of the annihilation of Ireland comes a transcendence of its very body and blood from which comes renewal and follows with it, the healing. Upon the very cornfields of America out of which relief was sent to Ireland a generation earlier, the Dillons and the Irish return to repay that blood bounty at Fredericksburg as the America they helped to conceive, tears itself asunder in the American Civil War.

All the family are inescapably marked by this turbulent twilight age of enlightenment, where two generations of the sons and daughters of the Dillons of the House of Fontenoy walk amongst the historical giants and charismatic disrupters of this age and some suffer with their people in the cesspit of the infamous workhouses as their world disintegrates. For the Dillons, passion, intrigue and danger are constant companions as new orders emerge. What they find and never lose is deathless love in a time of annihilation. Some grow strong once more, some forgive; none, who live through this descent of an old world, and the rise of a new, are ever to forget.

Theirs is the story of the Irish and the birth story of America, it is the story of The Fall of Abel.

The Author of The Fall of Abel is Daniel MacCarthy

Writer, historian and curator, Daniel MacCarthy is the founder of Boru Cultural Enterprises and its publishing and exhibition development imprint, The Heritage Factory.

He has project managed and formulated cultural policy reports, successful grant applications and programmes across government agencies and private sector organisations and has worked with Europe’s leading visitor experience design companies.

He has an unrivalled capacity for interconnecting, engaging and reaching out to all audiences in both sharing and making history. Daniel MacCarthy, having worked closely with the GAA and also UCD in securing UNESCO Status for Hurling and strongly and successfully campaigned for Irish Government ratification of the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Heritage, is presently pioneering a World Irish Heritage Mapping project.

Daniel who holds a Master’s degree in History from NUI Galway has a long track record of engagement with the diaspora on a professional level – as the curator of the Clare County Museum during its design stage, he represented Ireland at the International Council Of Museums Triennial Assembly in Barcelona based on his Irish diaspora project, The Legacy.
As an innovative community heritage practitioner, Daniel established the first Outdoor Heritage Interactive Trails which goes live as part of an interactive heritage map series, mappingthe.irish featuring some of the most scenic towns, villages and countryside in the country from Mallow to the Vee and the three halves of Clare, the western peninsulas and the shores of Lough Derg right to his native Lissycasey/Clondegad parish. This follows extensive collaboration with a leading third level campus company and Enterprise Ireland support.

Amongst some of his projects have been the Thomas Davis Bicentenary Heritage Display in Cork, the documentation of the St Mel’s Diocesan Museum which facilitated the salvaging of the extant collection by the National Museum of Ireland, the West Clare Railway Museum Project, curating the History of Gaelic Games exhibition for the Irish American Heritage Museum, conduct of the widely respected report into the Clare Collections Education Strategy, the feasibility planning for the Michael Cusack Centenary Project, creating the Boru, Emperor of the Irish Exhibition for East Clare Heritage, developing the Burren Centre outreach & educational programme, Lámha Suas (a first for non-designated museums) and its international touring exhibition, The Burren, A Living Landscape which resulted from public private patronage partnership that generated over 2 million footfall viewers.