Bad Bridget

Trevor Birney has optioned the rights with Peppiatt to academic book Bad Bridget by Leanne McCormick and Elaine Farrell, for which Peppiatt has written a script, with hopes to shoot in the next 12 months. The book focuses on the huge number of Irish women in the 1800s and 1900s who were incarcerated in US and Canadian prisons.

“They had all come off the famine ships, the coffin ships, and didn’t have the experience Saoirse Ronan had in Brooklyn, where she fell into the wonderful, comfy surroundings of Brooklyn,” explains Birney. “A lot of them, ended up in destitution, prostitution and crime, basically trying to stay alive, having fled this famine that had been imposed on the island of Ireland.

“The book chronicles their stories, and the title comes out of a lot of the work young Irish women found themselves in New York at the time in the kitchens of wealthy people, and many of the young women who came off the ships had what were [deemed] unpronounceable Irish names. They were all given the name Bridget. There were some ‘bad’ Bridgets, and they ended up in prison.”