When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate. I used to wonder if ever a prisoner might by some means climb the high, buttressed wall and slip away in the darkness by the canal to the quays and find friends to hide him under a load of kelp in a fishing boat, as happens to my ballad-singing man. The play was considered offensive to some extreme Nationalists before it was acted, because it showed the police in too favourable a light, and a Unionist paper attacked it after it was acted because the policeman was represented “as a coward and a traitor”; but after the Belfast police strike that same paper praised its “insight into Irish character.” After all these ups and downs it passes unchallenged on both sides of the Irish Sea.
–Lady Gregory
Dublin 1909
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory, c.1905
Playwright's Notes from Lady Gregory