Galway Bay Murders on RTÉ One: Come for the killing, stay for the characters

Star Trek’s Kate Mulgrew has beamed down to the west of Ireland for the likable if clichéd thriller The Galway Bay Murders (RTÉ One, Sunday, 9.30pm).

She brings the same steely quality that was a feature of her tenure as Captain Kathryn Janeway, to the part of a New York police officer on secondment in Galway, where she becomes entangled in a homicide inquiry after a woman’s body turns up in a bog.

It’s The Field meets a glamorous US cop drama from the 1980s or further back. John B Keane with a bit of Crockett and Tubbs stitched into the lining.

The “Yank abroad” getting their nose into some local bother is a hard-to-kill staple of Irish film and television. But Mulgrew brings something new to the formula. She is magnetically flinty, and there are intriguing hints about a recent trauma that has sent her from New York to Ireland. The Galway Bay Murders also benefits from a strong supporting cast.

Another Star Trek alumnus, Colm Meaney, pops up as a no-nonsense local sergeant and Love/Hate’s John Connors plays the beat garda who joins Nora Savage (Mulgrew) in her investigation.

The actual mystery is a bit ho-hum and also behind the times insofar as it leans into the now frowned-upon trope of the dead woman turning up in a remote area. This was fodder for every crime drama from Twin Peaks to True Detective before it occurred to writers that it was okay to also kill off men from time to time. How curious to encounter it in 2026, as perfectly preserved as a body in a bog.

The Galway Bay Murders’ first episode features lots of gardaí stomping around in the brackish quagmires of the Galway hinterland – fitting as the series is set to create a splash internationally. ITV has acquired the UK broadcast rights and it is expected to be sold to the US as well. This is presumably why the title was changed from the colloquial The Yank to the blander but more universally comprehensible The Galway Bay Murders.

Viewers from abroad will get a snapshot of modern Ireland in all its greasy-till-grubbiness. There is a suggestion from early on that the killing was not some random act of malevolence but part of a corporate conspiracy against an environmental activist and that the real villain in all of this might be unchecked tech-bro neo-feudalism.

You half expect the big baddy to be revealed to be a data centre and the script by first-time screenwriter Eithne Verling asks uncomfortable questions about how far official Ireland is prepared to go to facilitate dystopian tycoons whose defining principle is out-of-control avarice.

It also touches on our casual disregard for the environment, which, for all its beauty, we all too readily take for granted.

The storyline is, however, thoroughly eclipsed by Mulgrew and Connors’s compelling double act and by the evocative camerawork, which makes the west of Ireland look like the most beautiful and forlorn place in the universe.

Come for the killing but stay for the character work and the sweeping vistas – and try to ignore the cliches that occasionally swirl like mist on a soft day in Connemara.