This is the extraordinary story of an audacious fight for vulnerable souls on famine-ravaged Achill Island. Religious ferment swept across Ireland and Protestant clergyman Edward Nangle's Mission Colony was to lift the destitute people of Achill out of degradation and into salvation. The fury of the island elements, the devastation of famine, Nangle's own temperment and the suffering of his wife Eliza and her children all threatened the projects survival.

In the years of the Great Famine the ugly charge of offering food and material benefits in return for religious conversion tainted the Missions work. John MacHale, powerful Catholic Archbishop of Tuam spearheaded the Catholic Church's fight back against the masses of conversions. 

This dramatic tales disputes if Edward Nangle and the Achill Mission Colony saved hundreds from certain death or if they shamefully exploited people to religious conversion and exposes the fault lines of religion and politics down to this day.