The Irish R.M.
television series

The Irish R.M. is an Irish-British television comedy-drama series based on a trilogy of books by the Anglo-Irish novelists Somerville and Ross. It is set in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century west of Ireland.
Books
The television series is based on stories drawn from:
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1899)
Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. (Longmans Green & Co., London, 1908)
In Mr Knox's Country (Longmans Green & Co., London, 1915)
All three books are in the public domain and can be accessed and used without royalty. The various stories concern the life of an Irish ex-British Army officer, Major Sinclair Yeates, recently appointed a Resident Magistrate (R.M.) in Ireland, when the entire island was still part of the United Kingdom. In the television series the Major is English and has previously spent little or no time in Ireland.
Also there is Slipper's ABC of Foxhunting (Longmans Green & Co., London, 1903), an album of 20 paintings, by Edith Somerville, illustrating various fox-hunting scenes, with verse commentary by Slipper.
Filming
A television series based on the books was made in the 1980s, and was filmed in Ireland at locations in counties Kildare and Wicklow with additional locations in the west of Ireland in a co-production between Ulster Television and Raidió Teilifís Éireann. It was broadcast on Channel 4 and S4C in the United Kingdom, and RTÉ One in the Republic of Ireland. Like the books, the television series is a number of short stories around a few central characters.
Director Roy Ward Baker said it was "beautifully done."
Morristown Lattin – the house used as Aussolas Castle, the residence of Beryl Reid's incarnation of the erstwhile Mrs Knox (located at Newhall, Naas in County Kildare), was badly damaged by fire following completion of filming for the series.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7742554. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1899, 1908, 1915 and 1903.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Irish R.M.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.