O’Donovan Rossa’s great grandsons look back on his life in new documentary

O’Donovan Rossa’s great grandsons have made a documentary about their ancestor. It shows at Cork Film Festival, writes Ellie O’Byrne

WHEN film producer Williams Rossa Cole decided to make a documentary about his Irish patriot great-grandfather, discovering his forebear was the self-proclaimed “inventor of terrorism” was a shocking moment in a journey that propelled him and his brother to the centre of living history in centenary-era Ireland.

Pádraig Pearse’s graveside oration at the funeral of Fenian rebel Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, in August 1915, is acknowledged as one of the sparks that lit the fuse of the Easter Rising, but in life, O’Donovan Rossa was every bit as incendiary.