Episode 8

The finale opens in motion. Amanda pulls into a busy airport car park, takes a duffel bag of Eamon Cunningham's stolen drugs from the back of a commuter van, and visits Isaac Kemela at home, promising to look after him. She and Michael build a barrel fire on the patio and telephone Con Doyle, who gloats about holding Anthony over her; Amanda interrupts to ask for a meeting with Eamon. He refuses until she sends him live video of herself burning several bricks of the drugs, and promises to burn more every twelve hours until she gets a face-to-face. Eamon agrees to a meeting on neutral ground.

In prison, Eric is belligerent when he learns he is to be held in protective custody, and is told that Bren Kinsella wants nothing to do with him. Amanda briefs Anthony on the threats and the attempted kidnapping before setting out the plan: they will meet Eamon and kill him if he will not agree to a deal. Frank violently objects and Michael has to step in, but Frank storms out and Birdy follows him. Eamon promises his son Luke he will be home for his birthday party the next day, while Con brings Kem to a meeting and reports that he is working to set Michael up but that Michael is careful and trusts few people. Michael collects an anticonvulsant and prepares for the meeting.

The meeting is the season's central negotiation. Amanda offers Jimmy the chance to back out and he insists on going through with it. At the airport, Amanda thanks Eamon for coming; he says she gave him no choice, and offers not to kill Anthony if she returns the drugs, or he will double the bounty. She promises to burn the drugs should any harm come to Michael, Jimmy, Anthony or any Kinsella. He scoffs at the idea of 50 million for peace, saying the drugs alone were worth that, and she answers that the deaths, including her son's, are the difference. He apologises for Jamie's death and calls it an accident, but says his position requires ruthlessness and that he cannot accept her deal. Asked what would be acceptable, he says the return of the drugs plus one of Michael, Frank, Jimmy or Eric, meaning she would have saved three of them, and refuses to say which.

The resolution is carried out in parallel. Amanda reports the meeting to Frank and Birdy but tells them that Eamon specifically asked for the drugs and for Eric's head; Frank refuses and accuses her of steering the meeting to produce that outcome, and Birdy asks whether she has already agreed. Amanda says the decision is Frank's, as the boss. At Jamie's month's-mind mass, Amanda and Anthony join the mourners while Father Scriven begins the dedication. Kem meets Con Doyle in the street; Jimmy approaches in a ski mask but freezes, giving Con time to speed away; Kem overpowers him and stops the vehicle, and Jimmy, no longer frozen, guns Con down. Birdy telephones Eamon and learns the truth, that the choice of which Kinsella should die was left to Amanda, and races to tell Frank, whom she finds apparently overdosed on cocaine in the living room; the episode does not confirm whether he survives.

Eamon's flight home is interrupted by Cenk Batuk, who tells him his father has lost confidence in him; in a multi-storey car park Cenk and his guard are shot dead and Michael, who has followed Eamon to Spain, tells him that Amanda lied to him and shoots him through the right eye, drops the weapon and walks away. Birdy, lighting a candle before the Virgin Mary, tells Amanda that she and Amanda's father agree it is time for Amanda to return home with Anthony; Amanda answers that she is a Kinsella now, and that she cannot go home. The instruction Nikita carries to Eric, to use Kem and 20,000 to eliminate the eyewitness who threatens him, is left unresolved, and no series 1 source states its outcome.

Clare Dunne is the finale's centre and the element every notice agreed on: the reveal that Amanda has lied to her own family about Eamon's terms, and her closing line, give the season a protagonist where it opened with three men. The weakness is the ending's dependence on The Godfather, which two national reviewers made the headline criticism, and Frank's collapse, which the Irish Times judged insufficiently prepared. What distinguishes it is the month's-mind mass, placing the season's violence inside a funeral ritual for the child who started the war, which is the episode's own invention whatever it borrows from Coppola.