How can it possibly go on without Assumpta and Father Peter? Assumpta you may

How can it possibly go on without Assumpta and Father Peter? Assumpta, you may recall, was just about to start a new life with Father Peter at the end of the last series when she was ruthlessly electrocuted mending a fuse in the basement of the pub.Patricia Corcoran, who had travelled from Blackburn, was sanguine about this: “It’s like Coronation Street. “St Patrick’s was the only church in the whole of feckin’ Ireland that looked right on TV,” says Quentin “Have a drink,” he adds. “That’s the only cure for living around here.”Having a drink in Fitzgerald’s is what everybody wants to do And to talk about the new series. “This is the exact spot where Father Peter threw his clerical collar over the bridge…”It’s Fitzgerald’s pub, though, that is the epicentre of Ballykissmania. Everybody wants to stand in front of it being snapped supping a pint. Most of the locals, however, prefer to hang out at the Avoca Inn across the street Said Michael Byrne, “I come in here for a bit of peace”. Told a new series is starting, he rejoins, “Is that right?” and turns back to his conversation with Quentin Doyle who works in a factory nearby.

At my urging, they reluctantly turn their attention to Ballykissmania.”There’s tourists getting lost all the time looking for Ballykissangel,” says Michael. Coach after coach with GB plates rolls in filled with fans of, as they prefer to call it, Ballykay They are intensely curious about the new series. What will the new priest be like, the one who will take the place of beloved, tragic Father Peter? How can the new barmaid, played by Victoria Smurfit (in real life an Irish heiress), possibly replace Assumpta?And so they pile into the Ballykay Mini Market where, unendingly on a loop, panpipes play “Galway Bay” to buy the Ballykay souvenirs which far outnumber the normal items of Leprechauniana – Ballykay tea-towels, keyrings, thimbles, bookmarks, fudge and naturally Ballykay T-shirts which, unlike the Tour de France T-shirts, are not marked down.And then they scatter to drink in the sights. Yvonne Fogwell has come all the way from Australia – she is a computer supervisor in Sydney – and now she stands on the old bridge over the Avoca River “Everybody watches this at home,” she says “I’ve got every episode on tape.” She stares at the water “Oh my God!” she exclaims suddenly. They sell so much that it’s always fresh.”
But what Avoca is chiefly saturated with is Ballykissmania. And there was serious saturation also at Fitzgerald’s pub, where drinkers had spilled out on to the street At Fitz’s, it seems, the stout is of superb quality “It’s a great pint,” said one “So fresh. It looks to me like there’s reasonable room for doubt about the sentence too.”.

YESTERDAY (SUNDAY), on the eve of its reincarnation as Ballykissangel the BBC soap, the charming village of Avoca, Co Wicklow was, in every way, saturated. At one point, a coach from North Wales, a camper van with English plates, a tractor and a cavalcade of wedding limos leaving St Patrick’s church came into honking conjunction. We’ve got to do one thing at a time, and for the time being, I’m just working on getting an appeal,” he says. “But the slap-dash approach to this case doesn’t seem to be limited to procedure. The charges, Nick insists, would never have stood up had Ruth been in court to defend herself. The evidence, he says, speaks for itself: “My sister had a small baby in the house. She wouldn’t let drugs through the front door after Davide was born What’s more, they never had a penny.

If she were involved in big-time drug trafficking, she would have had something to show for it besides an 11-year prison sentence, wouldn’t she?”Mr Iorio is more circumspect, but holds out more hope for Ruth now than at any time since her arrest: “I’m not going to go into the merits of this case. Ciro just wanted a healthy son.”Their second child, Davide, born in August 1991, was just the ticket, but after a while even that failed to keep Ciro from beating Ruth. Taking advantage of a spell during which Di Martino was behind bars, and having made sure that his passport would be confiscated if he were let out on parole, Ruth headed back home to Essex, leaving no forwarding address.No one, swears Nick, ever attempted to trace her: not the Di Martino family, nor the police when they came up with transcripts of some very unclear bugged phone conversations in which, they said, Ruth could be heard discussing a big drugs deal; nor the court when a co-defendant placed the blame on “the one person who wasn’t there to defend herself,” says Nick – swore that Ruth had been pulling all the strings.Ruth’s nine co-defendants got off with light sentences Ruth, however, was given 11 years. “Something she found out afterwards made her think the baby wasn’t that ill after all. “He gave her papers to sign and said there was nothing she could do about it.

It’s the only thing my sister’s ever done in her life that she feels really guilty about,” says Nick. You just had to go into the local bar and they’d tell you.”Ciro made Ruth put their first child, Giarda, up for adoption, telling her that the state was removing the baby to provide her with special treatment she needed for her spina bifida. “But despite the company she kept, she never got into drugs or prostitution; she never sank that low,” Nick says.For many years, Ruth remained locked in a stormy and often violent relationship in Naples, with a man ten years her senior called Ciro Di Martino. Di Martino, who died of a brain haemorrhage in 1995, had a string of convictions for minor offences.”He wasn’t a hood, exactly, in that he probably wasn’t even violent with other men, only with people he had some power over, like my sister,” recalls Nick, who met Ciro during a visit to Naples in the late Eighties “He was a bit of a criminal, but he wasn’t much good at it Everyone knew what he was up to. At the age of 18, she ran away from the adoptive parents to whom she had never been close. (“They’re much friendlier now than they’ve been for years,” Nick says, “but that isn’t really saying much.”) For over a decade, Ruth wandered through France and Italy, doing odd jobs, falling in with petty criminals, and rarely calling home. Then the document officially branding her as a fugitive was never signed by the judge.