We saw in the previous episode of Irish Blood that Callum Deasy, aka Father Al, wanted Declan Murphy’s hard drive, which he believed to have been in the possession of his daughter, Fiona Fox. But Fiona had no clue where the drive was, and she hoped her father’s assistant, Minerva Quilligan, would be able to give her some answers. One thing that became clear to Fiona was that Quilligan knew where the drive was, but she was not ready to hand it over to her because she felt that the drive was the only thing keeping her alive. At the end of the episode, Quilligan was indeed killed by somebody, and Father Al left Wicklow for good. Father Al had warned Fiona that though he was leaving the town, it didn’t mean that she was safe. He told her that certain really powerful people would come looking for her sooner rather than later. Fiona still had no intentions of leaving Wicklow, though her mother didn’t want to stay even for a minute longer. So let’s find out what happened in the episode and if Fiona was finally able to find the dive and make a breakthrough.
Spoilers Ahead
Were Fiona and Roisin able to find the drive?
After Quilligan’s death, Fiona went back to her house, the crime scene, to look for any sort of clue that could lead her to the hard drive. Sergeant Claude got really mad at Roisin for bringing her there, and he told her that he was suspending her for disobeying his orders and leaking information to Fiona. Fiona’s mother just couldn’t understand her obsession with solving Declan’s death. She told her that she was putting her life at risk by meddling in affairs of the law, but Fiona had made up her mind to stay back. Isidora and Mary were talking when the former mentioned how Quilligan believed in the Virgin Mary. That’s when it struck Fiona that she had seen an idol of the Virgin Mary near Quilligan’s porch. She intuitively felt that she could have hidden the hard drive there, and she was absolutely right. Fiona found the hard drive, but then they found out that it was encrypted. It didn’t take long for Tess to hack into it and get to know that it had a lot of documents, a chunk of which were bank statements. Fiona asked Tess to find out who those statements belonged to so that they could find out who was pulling the strings.
Was Sergeant Claude working for criminals?
From the very beginning, Fiona and Roisin felt that Sergeant Claude was probably on the payroll of whoever had murdered Declan. He just didn’t seem interested in carrying out an investigation, and it felt like he just wanted to close the case and make everyone believe that Declan had taken his own life. Fiona asked Roisin to inform Sergeant Claude that she had found the hard drive, as she wanted to lay a trap for him and catch him red-handed. She knew that if he was working for somebody, he would definitely try to steal the hard drive from the evidence room, and then they would be able to catch him. Moreover, Roisin had overheard him talking to somebody on a call, and he was going to meet that person the next day. Roisin hid in the evidence room, and that’s when it came to be known that Claude, no matter how reluctant he was to carry out an investigation, had nothing to do with Declan’s murder. It was Garda Henderson who was the mole, he was the one who stole the hard drive from the evidence room. He went and gave it to a man named Wylie Moles, who seemed to be a gun for hire working for the mastermind of the plan. I think Henderson became a mole to earn some extra cash, and from the brief conversation he had with Wylie, it was evident that he was made to believe that nobody would get hurt in the process. But that was not true: Declan and Quilligan had lost their lives, and the people who were pulling the strings didn’t have any intention of sparing the lives of people who created obstacles for them.
Why Did Fiona Vacate Her Cottage?
There were two events that happened at the end of Irish Blood episode 5: firstly, Fiona got to know that her father had mortgaged the cottage she was living in to Bran Donovan, the patriarch of the Donovan family, and secondly, Wylie Moles, the same man who met Henderson, broke into prison and busted Johnny McIntyre out. Whatever happened in episode 5 increased my suspicion about Donovan’s family involvement in Declan’s murder even more. Bran and Siobhan even came to Isidora’s house when they got to know that Mary and Fiona were leaving for the States. They were a bit taken aback (maybe I am reading between the lines too much, but it did feel that way) when they got to know that Fiona was staying back. It felt that she was served the notice of repossession just so that she got deterred from her path and lost the motivation to continue her investigation. Also, Bran met Musa and told him that, because he had found out the truth about his son’s death, he wanted to invest in his gym and make sure that he did not have to face any financial issues in the future. Even at that time, it felt like Bran had something else on his mind. Also, as stated earlier, Wylie broke McIntyre out of prison. Johnny McIntyre held Finn Murphy at gunpoint, and it felt like he really wanted to pull the trigger. Though the episode left us on a cliffhanger, I don’t think that he would take the risk of killing a policeman. That said, in the 6th episode, we will finally get to know if Siobhan and Bran had any role to play in the murder of Fiona’s father or if there were some other unknown masterminds pulling the strings. Also, I am low-key excited to see if Roisin and Tess ever come face-to-face, because that would be one interesting meeting, given it is quite evident that both of them are quite attracted to each other.
