Dr Marie Cassidy brings a deep sense of justice to documentary on Ireland’s Last Witch Trial

The last time we saw former State Pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy on our screens, it was as a game contestant on Dancing with the Stars, where her years of medical expertise were of little use as she tried to master the paso doble. She is on firmer ground in her engaging new documentary, Dr Marie Cassidy Investigates Ireland’s Last Witch Trial (RTÉ One, 10.15pm), which chronicles a literal witch hunt in Presbyterian Antrim in the early 18th century.

This is both an Irish story and the very antithesis of an Irish story. The women dragged into the stocks in Carrickfergus were part of the devout Presbyterian congregation of Islandmagee, whose forebears had come to Ireland from Scotland – and their views of witchcraft were very different from those of the natives.

To Presbyterians at that time, witchcraft meant consorting with the Devil. But these were an “imported set of beliefs”, historian Gillian Kenny explains: in the rest of the country, attitudes to the supernatural seemed more relaxed.

Irish witches were not malicious – typically the worst they got up to was “stealing your butter”, says Kenny. “Irish people were afraid of the faeries and the evil eye,” she says.

Not so in Islandmagee, a peninsula close to Larne, where the inhabitants were God-fearing brethren straight out of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Here, people believed the devil walked among them, and when Mary Dunbar, an 18-year-old newcomer to the peninsula, began to experience fits and claimed a conspiracy of witches had cast a hex on her, townspeople were only too eager to believe her.

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Cassidy might not have set the dance floor alight, but as a television presenter she combines a sober style with a deeply felt sense of justice.

She also brings her expertise as a pathologist to bear when she works with experts at UCD to recreate the impact on the accused women of the punishment they suffered when they were locked in stocks and rocks and other objects were thrown at them. The ordeal went on for hours, and it is possible, she concludes, that they might have sustained life-changing brain injuries.

To Cassidy, it all comes down to misogyny. “This was a case of prejudice… prejudice against women,” she says, as she visits Islandmagee, where a memorial to the women stands under the grainy Ulster skies. “That’s been my work. Dealing with women who suffered at the hands of prejudice – at the hands of men.”