Every week we take a look in the RTÉ Guide archives to check out the cover stories from years gone by. On this week in 1966, the Guide highlighted a major period drama written by James Plunkett, best known today as the author of the hugely successful novel Strumpet City, which aired on St Patrick's Day that year. When Do You Die - Friend? was set during the 1798 rebellion and was based on the life of William Farrell, a prosperous young saddler from Carlow who became involved in the United Irishmen because, as Plunkett put it in the magazine, "in common with Wolfe Tone and the European revolutionaries, he believed that People should come before Property!"
Farrell was arrested for his part in the unsurrection and held at Carlow Gaol, where he was interrogated and his comrades tortured. Yet, as Plunkett says, "he stubbornly refused to turn informer and lived to write his harrowing eye-witness accounts of the sufferings of the people of Ireland during the terror of '98."
Plunkett described the TV drama as "a true account...There is no incident in it that is not described or implied in the original [memoir]" and wrote that
"We can be certain that the adaptation for television has William Farrell's full approval for in the last paragraph of his autobiography he writes: 'I know very well I have.not been able to dress-up my account in the style of modern writers, but if anyone after me shall choose to give it to the public in a more fashionable dress, he is heartily welcome and he has my full liberty to do so'.
That was written on the twenty-fifth day of February, 1845. On St. Patrick's Day, Telefís Eireann, across the space of more than one hundred years, will accept William Farrell's invitation."
