Three Irish Families and Steven Knight's Britain

By T.S. Flynn

Standfirst

The Guinnesses inherit power. The Shelbys inherit survival. The Quinns inherit conflict. Across three television sagas, The Guinnesses, Peaky Blinders, and This Town, Steven Knight tells the story of Irish experience from landlord estates and industrial Birmingham to the multicultural Britain of the Two Tone generation. What emerges is not history exactly, but something far more powerful: modern folklore.

At first glance, The Guinnesses, Peaky Blinders, and This Town appear to have little in common. One follows an Anglo-Irish brewing dynasty at the height of its influence. Another tells the story of gangster outsiders navigating the industrial Midlands. The third traces the lives of a family caught between republicanism, migration, and the cultural revolution that produced Two Tone music. Yet viewed together, they reveal a remarkable continuity. All three dramas are ultimately concerned with the fate of extended families confronting profound social change. Through the Guinnesses, the Shelbys, and the Quinns, Steven Knight has created three different versions of the Irish story. One family begins with wealth and power, another survives through violence and improvisation, and the third struggles to escape inherited conflicts altogether.

There is no getting around it: Steven Knight writes exceptionally good television. He understands pace, atmosphere, and character better than almost anyone currently working in British drama. His stories crackle with energy and his characters linger in the imagination long after the credits roll. Yet therein lies the tension. Much of Knight's mythology is carried not only by his scripts but by his casting. The haunted authority that Cillian Murphy brings to Tommy Shelby, the dynastic ambition embodied by Anthony Boyle and Louis Partridge in The Guinnesses, the chilling charisma of Charlene McKenna's Captain Swing, the rooted humanity of Packy Lee's Johnny Dogs, the quiet seriousness of Séainín Brennan's Mrs. Porter, and the youthful idealism brought to This Town by Levi Brown and Jordan Bolger all help transform history into something closer to folklore. Knight's greatest gift may be his ability to turn recognisable social types into modern legends. The very instincts that make him such a compelling storyteller also encourage him to transform history into mythology, rescuing Irish stories from neglect while simultaneously turning them into legend.

The Guinness Family: History from Above

To understand the full scope of Knight's imagination, one must begin with The Guinnesses. Here he leaves behind the factories and alleyways of industrial Britain and enters the world of the Anglo-Irish elite. The Guinness family occupies an unusual position in Irish historical memory because their story is neither one of poverty nor exclusion. Through commerce, philanthropy, and industrial success, they became one of the most influential families in the English-speaking world. Knight recognises the dramatic possibilities immediately. Rather than presenting the Guinnesses primarily as businessmen and industrial administrators, he transforms them into the protagonists of an epic dynastic saga. Inheritance becomes destiny, family disagreements become political drama, and commercial ambition assumes the weight of historical significance.

The most revealing tension in The Guinnesses lies in the distance between the television Arthur Guinness and the historical Lord Ardilaun. On screen, Arthur emerges as a thoughtful and sympathetic heir burdened by family expectations, responsibility, and personal sacrifice. Viewers are encouraged to understand his struggles and feel the weight of inheritance resting upon his shoulders. History, however, looks different depending on where one stands. From the drawing rooms of Dublin, Arthur Guinness appeared a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and nation-builder. From a tenant holding in Mayo or Galway, the picture could be considerably less flattering. The historical Ardilaun inhabited a world where philanthropy and landlordism comfortably coexisted, where great fortunes rested upon social arrangements increasingly challenged by the Land War.

The Guinness estates operated within the same agrarian landscape that produced rent strikes, boycotts, evictions, agitation, and political violence. The world of the Land War was not an abstraction but a struggle over power, authority, and survival. This reality becomes particularly difficult to ignore when viewed alongside the events surrounding the Lough Mask Murders of 1882. The same social structures that produced brewing fortunes and landed influence also produced the bitterness and desperation that fuelled agrarian conflict. This historical landscape forms a revealing contrast with my own essay, The Connemara Convictions: A Case for the Belated Recognition of a Land League Patriot. There I explored a world of tenant farmers, estate officials, local grievances, and competing ideas of justice rather than one of dynastic influence. History looked entirely different depending upon whether one viewed it from the estate house or the tenant holding.

History, in short, operated simultaneously from above and below.

That is precisely where Knight's mythology becomes most revealing. His Arthur Guinness is a man burdened by conscience. The historical Lord Ardilaun was also the public face of a landlord system that many rural Irish people regarded as fundamentally unjust. The same individual could be celebrated as a philanthropist in one context and resented as a landlord in another. That contradiction is not a flaw in history but one of its defining characteristics. Knight's strength as a dramatist lies in his ability to identify emotionally powerful patterns. His weakness is that history rarely cooperates with such neat storytelling. Real lives are inconsistent, contradictory, and frequently resistant to mythic interpretation. Yet this is also why The Guinnesses matters. By placing brewing magnates at the centre of an Irish story, Knight reminds viewers that Irish history was never confined to poverty, rebellion, or migration alone.

The Shelby Family: History from Below

If the Guinnesses represent history from above, the Shelbys represent history from below. Their world is one of migration, instability, outsider status, and improvisation. Unlike the Guinness family, who inherit influence, the Shelbys inherit uncertainty. Their survival depends upon their ability to navigate a hostile and rapidly changing environment. In Knight's hands this social history becomes something approaching folklore. Tommy Shelby is not simply a gangster. He becomes a war veteran, entrepreneur, tribal leader, family patriarch, and outsider all at the same time. The performance by Cillian Murphy elevates the character beyond realism and into the realm of myth. Viewers are invited to see him not merely as an individual but as a symbolic figure representing resilience, ambition, and survival itself.

To understand what Knight changed, however, it is necessary to examine the tradition he inherited. Across several influential screen depictions of the Troubles, Irish republicanism was framed as a game. The pattern is striking: Harry's Game, The Crying Game, and Patriot Games. The titles differ, but the underlying metaphor remains constant. Politics becomes a contest played by spies, soldiers, informers, and gunmen. Even when the word itself disappears, the structure survives. In The Long Good Friday, a young Pierce Brosnan's IRA assassin functions almost like a supernatural force disrupting the orderly logic of the London underworld. The republican becomes less a human being than an unpredictable piece on the board.

Knight inherits this tradition and explodes it. In Peaky Blinders, politics is no longer a game but a mythology. Republicans, loyalists, gangsters, industrialists, and intelligence officers occupy the same dramatic universe. The IRA, the UVF, and the Shelby organisation are translated into the language of gangster epics and westerns. This makes for extraordinary drama. Yet it also strips away some of the ideological, social, and religious complexities that shaped the historical movements themselves. Politics becomes spectacle and conflict becomes folklore. The result is less a political thriller than a modern folk epic about power, belonging, violence, and ambition.

The Quinn Family: The Inheritance of Conflict

The most historically grounded of Knight's Irish families may also be the most interesting. The Quinn family in This Town inherits neither wealth nor criminal territory. Instead, they inherit a conflict. Their world is shaped by the long shadow of republican violence, migration, and political division. Yet what makes the series compelling is its refusal to reduce its characters to those influences alone. Eamonn Quinn belongs to a generation defined by political loyalties and historical grievances. The younger generation inhabits a very different world. They carry the legacy of conflict without necessarily accepting its assumptions. The resulting tension drives much of the drama and gives the series its emotional depth.

Nowhere is the difference between mythology and realism more apparent than in Knight's treatment of republican women. In Peaky Blinders, Captain Swing, played by Charlene McKenna, emerges almost fully formed from folklore. Immaculately composed, lethally intelligent, and seemingly omniscient, she possesses the aura of a revolutionary Moriarty. Her authority feels almost supernatural and she enters scenes less as a participant in history than as a force acting upon it. Everything about the character pushes her toward legend rather than political realism. Yet This Town offers a revealing counterpoint through Mrs. Porter, played by Séainín Brennan. Unlike Captain Swing, Mrs. Porter belongs firmly to the gritty political reality of the 1980s. A nurse by profession and an IRA operative by commitment, she navigates the dangerous space between Eamonn Quinn's organisation and British intelligence. Brennan's performance derives its power not from theatricality but from restraint, discipline, competence, and plausibility.

The contrast between Mrs. Porter and Captain Swing reveals the competing impulses running throughout Knight's work. One belongs to mythology. The other belongs to history. Captain Swing exists in the same legendary universe as Tommy Shelby. Mrs. Porter feels like somebody who might plausibly have stepped directly from the historical record. Yet even here Knight's strengths and weaknesses remain visible. This Town captures the atmosphere of diaspora life with remarkable confidence but occasionally stumbles over linguistic details. Republican language carried political significance and specific phrases signalled very particular understandings of identity and legitimacy. At times the dialogue captures the culture perfectly. At others it sounds slightly off to ears familiar with the political traditions being portrayed. Knight understands emotional truth instinctively. Cultural precision is not always his strongest suit.

Beyond the Green Ghetto

One of Knight's greatest achievements is his refusal to isolate Irish experience from the wider story of Britain. For much of the twentieth century, Irish characters existed in British drama as caricatures, suspects, or outsiders. They belonged to a separate world. In This Town, that separation largely disappears. Irish families share streets, workplaces, schools, pubs, and friendships with Caribbean, English, and Asian communities. Their story becomes part of a much larger history of working-class Britain. Migration is no longer a marginal subplot. It becomes a central force shaping society itself. This perspective reflects the reality experienced by countless Irish families far more accurately than many earlier depictions.

The same impulse is visible in Knight's treatment of Irish Travellers. Through Johnny Dogs and the wider Traveller world of Peaky Blinders, Traveller culture is presented as a source of memory, loyalty, spirituality, and belonging. Packy Lee's performance is central to this achievement. Johnny Dogs is not portrayed as a nuisance, stereotype, or curiosity. He is one of the few genuinely trustworthy figures in Tommy Shelby's universe. The portrayal is undeniably romanticised. Yet romanticisation is not always the same thing as dismissal. In a media environment that has frequently reduced Travellers to crude stereotypes, Knight's willingness to grant them dignity and symbolic significance feels almost radical.

The Two Tone Family

What ultimately distinguishes This Town from Knight's other Irish dramas is its faith in cultural transformation. While the Guinnesses inherit power and the Shelbys inherit survival strategies, the younger characters of This Town inherit music. Politics appears throughout the series as a force of division, obligation, and historical memory. Two Tone offers something entirely different. It creates the possibility of choosing a future rather than simply inheriting a past. In that sense, the real family at the heart of This Town is not biological but cultural. It is a family formed through music, friendship, and shared experience rather than bloodlines or ideology.

Bands such as The Specials, The Selecter, and The Beat represented one of the most remarkable cultural experiments in modern Britain. Caribbean rhythms merged with punk energy. Black and white musicians shared stages. New identities emerged that refused to fit neatly within older categories of ethnicity, nationality, or political allegiance. Music became a language capable of crossing boundaries that politics often reinforced. Knight understands this instinctively. His greatest achievement in This Town is not his depiction of republicanism, loyalism, or state power. It is his recognition that culture frequently transforms society more effectively than ideology. The real heroes of his modern landscape are not gunmen, fixers, or political operatives. They are the young people dancing to the future before anyone else can hear it.

The Romance and the Reality

Taken together, the Guinnesses, the Shelbys, and the Quinns form a remarkable trilogy of Irish experience. One family begins with power. One survives through resilience. One searches for a way beyond inherited conflict. Through all three stories runs the same fascination with the transformation of history into myth. Knight repeatedly returns to the moment when ordinary individuals become symbols, when family memory becomes folklore, and when historical complexity hardens into legend. That fascination explains both the strengths and weaknesses of his work. It is why his dramas resonate so deeply and why historians occasionally wince while watching them.

This instinct inevitably produces distortions. Yet it also allows Knight to achieve something rare. He restores dramatic significance to communities that have often been caricatured, marginalised, or ignored. People rarely inherit history in its raw form. They inherit stories, songs, family memories, local legends, and half-remembered grievances. Mythology is not something added to history after the fact. It is often the form in which history survives. Steven Knight understands this instinctively. He has not given us the Irish diaspora exactly as it was. He has given us three Irish families through which to imagine what that history felt like. The details are sometimes debatable, the myths occasionally obscure the realities, but the emotional truth remains powerful. And that, perhaps, is why millions continue to watch.

Author Bio

T.S. Flynn is a Brisbane-based writer whose family story spans Tuam in County Galway and Ashton-in-Makerfield in Lancashire. His essays explore the meeting points between Irish history, diaspora experience, literature, music, memory, and popular culture. A contributor to The Wild Geese, he is particularly interested in how communities transform lived experience into stories, myths, and cultural identity.

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