FEBRUARY 2006

'You Thought You Knew' - New BBC ONE series

Journalist Jim McDowell sets out in search of the answers to three new areas of interest, The Border, Cúchulainn and The Famine. 'You Thought you Knew...' on BBC ONE Northern Ireland, which starts on Wednesday 15th February at 10.45pm begins with Jim going in search of a familiar frontier - the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland - a line drawn on a map that has influenced lives here for the past 80 years. Tales of smuggling a mother's corpse across the border and a person who could sleep with their head in Northern Ireland and their feet in the Republic of Ireland are featured in the new series.

Jim walks the line starting on the shores of Lough Foyle on the Donegal - Londonderry border in the North West, taking in the border counties right round to the shores of Carlingford Lough in the east, and along the way Jim meets historians and the local people who live there and hears their stories about the border. The programme tells how the Boundary Commission was set up in 1924 to work out where the border should be by listening to local people about which side of the border they wanted to be on.

In the three part series Jim also looks at the legend of Cúchulainn in programme two and examines if our view of The Famine is correct in the final programme, which takes a look at our understanding of The Famine, or The Great Hunger, recognised by historians as the worst natural disaster in Europe in the 1800s. The programme dismisses the myth that The Famine only affected the west of Ireland when in fact no one escaped, north, east, south or west. Due largely to the failure of the potato crop, 1 million people more fled to all corners of the globe just 160 years ago.

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