When Irish convicts were banished from Cobh to Botany Bay

Ireland, 1788. Crime was rife, the jails were bursting. Revolutionary ideas were being bandied around. Britain had once off-loaded its criminal elements to America, but since independence somewhere else was needed to place hundreds of men and women – convicted of anything, from murder, to stealing a handkerchief.
The solution: an “open air prison, with walls 14,000 miles thick”. So was born Britain’s Sydney Cove experiment near Botany Bay. Banished (BBC2, Thursdays, 9pm) – a gripping seven-part series written by Jimmy McGovern – charts the establishment of this first penal colony in a “godforsaken corner” of Australia.