The grandson of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, whose life was said to have been ruined after a bitter courtroom clash with Unionist leader and lawyer Sir Edward Carson, has stumbled on a million-to-one discovery about his ancestor s deathbed conversion to Catholicism.
And it was all thanks to the team behind the TV show Give My Head Peace and a Belfast priest who narrowly escaped death in a shooting in South Africa 14 years ago.
The remarkable find came as the normally comedic team from Belfast were preparing a very different type of documentary with Merlin Holland about the links between his grandfather and Carson often dubbed the father of Northern Ireland .