The Hanging Gale is a four-episode television serial which first aired on RTÉ One and BBC1 in 1995. The series was a British–Irish co-production, made by Little Bird Films for BBC Northern Ireland in association with Raidió Teilifís Éireann, with support from the Irish Film Board. The serial, set in 1846 at the beginning of Ireland's Great Famine, starred the four McGann brothers: Joe McGann, Paul McGann, Mark McGann and Stephen McGann, and was based on an original idea by Joe and Stephen McGann while researching their family's history. The title of the series comes from the term 'hanging gale', the name for a widespread practice in Ireland at the time, where a landlord would allow new tenants a six-month grace period on payment of their rent, with the expectation that the rent owed would be paid when the land's crops were harvested and sold.
Joe McGann
Mark McGann
Paul McGann
Stephen McGann
Michael Kitchen
Fiona Victory
Tina Kellegher
Sean McGinley
Gerard McSorley
Joe Pilkington
Ciarán Fitzgerald
Ciara Marley
Barry Barnes
Birdy Sweeney
Maire Ni Ghrainne
Mal Whyte
Dave Duffy
Peter Caffrey
Joe Savino
B.J. Hogg
Gerry Walsh
Oliver Maguire
Eileen Colgan
Alan Standford
Liam Carney
Seamus Moran
Albie Woodington
George Shane
Frank O'Sullivan
Ian Beattie
Stephen Kennedy
Dylan O'Connell