When Irish convicts were banished from Cobh to Botany Bay

The human tragedy that was the transportation of Irish convicts to Australia was immortalised in the sporting anthem, ‘Fields of Athenry’. The first journey from Cobh was one of the most dangerous, writes Robert Hume

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.