Hard Border E-Book

Darach MacDonald

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In his travelogue of the abandoned 50-mile route along the Ulster Canal, Darach MacDonald presents a close-up narrative history of Ireland. On his journey through five of Ulster's nine counties, he looks at the confounding realities and identities brought to the boil by history, geography, politics and faith. He traces the region's pivotal role in the story of Ireland; the facts and anomalies of an arbitrary partition, the impact on local communities, especially among minorities marooned on the 'wrong side', as well as uplifting efforts to forge new links and aid the recovery from trauma.Through travelogues, journals, tales and poetry, he examines how the border and its communities have been portrayed through the decades. Above all, these are the stories of tightly knit communities straddling an historically contested line while struggling for survival and recognition in its liminal shadows.

Leseprobe

Darach MacDonald has been a professional journalist since 1976, working throughout Ireland, Europe and in Canada and closing his full-time newspaper career as editor of the award-winning Ulster Herald. In 2015, he was conferred with a PhD by Ulster University (Magee) for research on a frontier Ulster loyalist marching band, having completed his MA thesis on the Irish Boundary Commission almost forty years previously at University College Dublin. He is the author of four previous books: The Sons of Levi (1998); The Chosen Fews: Exploding Myths in South Armagh (2000); Blood & Thunder: Inside an Ulster Protestant Band (2010); and Tóchar: Walking Ireland’s Ancient Pilgrim Paths (2013). A native of Clones, a proud father and very soon-to-be grandfather, he now lives in the border city of Derry.

Hard Border

Walking through a Century of Irish Partition

Darach MacDonald

HARD BORDER

First published in 2018 by

New Island Books

16 Priory Hall Office Park

Stillorgan

County Dublin

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Darach MacDonald, 2018

The Author asserts his moral rights in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-675-9

Epub ISBN: 978-1-84840-676-6

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-84840-677-3

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

Contents

Introduction: Always on Edge

1. Border Hopscotch: Castle Saunderson to Clones

2. Cheek by Jowl: Clones

3. Cloak and Dagger: Clones to Smithborough

4. At the Summit: Smithborough to Monaghan

5. County Town: Monaghan

6. Oriel Affairs: Monaghan to Middletown

7. Dark Edges: Middletown to Caledon

8. A Maimed Capital: Armagh

9. O’Neill Country: Caledon to Benburb

10. Friend or Foe: Benburb to the Moy, via Charlemont

11. The End is Neagh

Notes

Sources

Acknowledgements

In memory of my ‘wee’ brother Vincent MacDonald1965 – 2017Clones, County Monaghan – Hilltown, County Down

Introduction: Always on Edge

The regatta took place beside the humpbacked bridge at the foot of the brae that we still called Whitehall Street, although the name had been changed officially to MacCurtain Street when Clones was incorporated into the Irish Free State.1 Our motley fleet of improvised sailing vessels was comprised of rafts made from oil barrels strung together with planks of timber or old doors. One formidable vessel had two huge wooden sleepers, salvaged from the recently abandoned Great Northern Railway that had once made our town the rail hub of Ulster. Now they provided a juggernaut for a crew of young boys on this channel of the Ulster Canal, which spread out before us and stretched off into the distance towards Legarhill, Clonavilla, Glear and the unknown beyond. We were barely aware then that it had once connected Lough Erne with Lough Neagh, and with the Lagan Navigation, reached all the way to Belfast. It had been abandoned about thirty years previously in 1932, when my dad was still a boy, just as our Great Northern Railway connections to Belfast, Dundalk, Cavan and Enniskillen were severed in my early childhood.

Long before its formal demise, the Ulster Canal was dead in the water. An ill-conceived venture of narrow locks and bridges with an insufficient headwater supply, it was built for different barges than those plying the connecting inland waterways. It never attracted the traffic projected by its champions and investors. The link-up of the Erne and the Shannon to create a commercial route encompassing the entire island was too late, and proved an even bigger commercial failure than the Ulster Canal. Barely opened when the railway came to town, our canal was almost immediately outmoded, redundant and cast into a peripheral role. It was neglected at birth, then abandoned as an unwanted orphan of the Georgian era, a relic of pastoral pace shunted into obscurity by the steam, steel and speed of the Industrial Revolution.

Yet the canal still provided recreational diversion during my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s. Apart from the great regatta organised by the Whitehall Street gang, its towpath was a route to distant locations for adventure and exploration. It also provided an alternative border crossing for small-scale smugglers. And when our town was briefly a coarse-fishing Mecca for visitors from the English north and midlands in those times between the Troubles, I recall anglers on the banks. At Halloween, the overgrown channels provided a handy source of bulrushes. We harvested these and soaked their pillowy, dark brown bulbs in paraffin, setting them afire for torchlight Samhain rituals on the steps of the Protestant church that dominated the Diamond in the middle of our town.

I moved away from the town and gave the canal little thought until the rain-soaked summer of 1985, when we spent a week’s family holiday in a hired cruiser on the Erne. Local people say the Erne is in Fermanagh for half the year, and, for the other half, Fermanagh is in the Erne. During our holiday, the latter was the case. So day after day, we plied the sodden channels looking for somewhere interesting to berth other than Enniskillen. Near Crum Castle and the cross-border link to Belturbet one day, I saw on the navigation chart that the disused Ulster Canal was a short distance away. If opened, we could have cruised home for tea with my mother. I mentioned it later as a tourism objective. Others did too, and the idea slowly took hold of a campaign for the restoration of the Ulster Canal as the final link in Ireland’s inland navigation network.

It seemed feasible. After the Ballinamore-Ballyconnell link of the Erne and Shannon was restored in 1994, my uncle Michael Bowen pointed his boat north from his home on Cork Harbour. His voyage on the inland waterways ended with Bullfrog’s prow touching the harbour wall in Belleek. He told journalists he would be back when the Ulster Canal was opened and he could navigate all the way to Coleraine, completing his voyage from one end of Ireland to the other. Michael died in 2009, by which time the authorities had been talking about the Ulster Canal project for twenty years and more. Somehow, it always seems to slip down the agenda of funded projects. It has always lacked a champion to point out that it is more than an abandoned navigation for boat enthusiasts. It is a route through many of the places most deeply and persistently afflicted by the conflict of the past century. It is a route that presents another narrative of Ireland’s story, one that contradicts the shibboleths on which we build difference and confrontation.

Fifty years ago, Irish Times journalist John Healy wrote a series of articles charting the plight of his native Charlestown. These were published in book form as The Death of an Irish Town, and republished twenty years later in 1988 as No One Shouted Stop! Half a century on, my home town could look with envy at that small Mayo town’s tidy shopfronts, its modern road network, its proximity to rail corridors, its tourism economy and its nearby international airport. Clones was left teetering on the brink of ruin by partition. Perched precariously between two states, trade and communications were disrupted. The railway, the main employer in the town, proved bothersome because of its cross-border structure: the line to Cavan crossed the frontier six times within half a dozen miles of the town, just as the near-moribund Ulster Canal crossed it repeatedly before reaching Upper Lough Erne. The canal survived barely ten years of partition before it was abandoned, not that many might have noticed at that time. The railway followed a couple of decades later.

Yet this is not a book about a lost waterway or navigation. One week as the skipper of a rented houseboat on the Erne hardly qualifies me for that. This book is about the places the Ulster Canal’s route connects in fewer than 50 miles through five of Ulster’s nine counties – Cavan, Fermanagh, Monaghan, Armagh and Tyrone. It is the story of communities divided, split and torn apart by partition, and all that has devolved from Ireland’s largest and most intrusive man-made structure, the border. It is about people who are still affected on a daily basis by changes made over the course of a century that made them marginal, left them marooned on the periphery of two states that barely acknowledged each other’s existence. It is about people who must constantly negotiate what Gloria Anzaldúa defined as the ‘narrow strip along a steep edge’.2

These communities are always on edge, their latest anxieties centred on Brexit, the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from membership of the European Union. That would elevate the current Irish border into the UK’s only land frontier with the EU, at which Britain could end the free movement of goods, services and people. Casual assurances that free movement will continue as normal between both parts of Ireland and Britain seem nonsensical. A 1923 agreement under which free passage was guaranteed is unlikely to prevail with the other twenty-six members of the union, when weighed against the Treaty of Rome. Even that agreement of free movement under the Common Travel Area was modified in the case of Northern Ireland, where up until the 1960s, the unionist government imposed work permits on those who came from the south. That ended when Britain and Ireland joined the European Economic Community at the start of 1973. For the following 25 years, however, the benefits of shared European citizenship with free movement of goods and people were denied to those who lived on the Irish border. It was a militarised frontier of checkpoints, watchtowers, a barrier of threat and fear. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement between politicians representing all sides in Northern Ireland was negotiated with the assistance of the U.S. administration, underwritten by the sovereign governments in London and Dublin, generously funded by the European Union and endorsed by electors throughout Ireland. At last, removing the political and actual roadblocks of the past seemed possible in a shared future. Checkpoints disappeared, severed roads were reopened and, slowly at first, the troublesome and disputed frontier seemed of less consequence. People shopped, worked and socialised with a freedom never enjoyed before. It even promised institutional flexibility as the border that had stultified progress blended into the background. Infrastructural investments spanned frontiers for the first time. There was even an announcement of plans for a cross-border greenway walking and cycling route on the towpath of the Ulster Canal under the aegis of Waterways Ireland, the cross-border agency based at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.3

It now seems like a short, fleeting golden age. On 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union with the effective, yet meaningless slogan that it would ‘take back control’ of Britain’s borders.4 The only border not rigorously controlled, of course, was the land frontier in Ireland where I started walking shortly after former prime minister David Cameron set the referendum date. I completed the first three stages while the outcome still seemed an inevitable and comfortable remain victory. I resumed in late September when there was still no indication of what the crushing defeat would entail. And I completed the final stages almost a year after starting, as attention turned at last to what might happen in Ireland. I walked through bland assurances that there would be ‘no return to the borders of the past’ and came to rest on a preliminary but inconclusive agreement all sides claimed as a victory. And still we don’t know what the outcome will be. Yet one thing is certain from the evidence of a century of Irish partition, British assurances that free movement will continue as before may have radically different meanings in Westminster, Brussels, Dublin and Stormont. Indeed, the role and nature of the border are subject to radically different perspectives much closer to home.

Northern Ireland’s first minister, Arlene Foster, comes from my home parish, but I don’t come from hers. She grew up on a farm at Dernawilt in Fermanagh. I grew up in Clones town, about four miles away in County Monaghan. My Catholic parish spilled northwards towards Fivemiletown in County Tyrone, far beyond Dernawilt and St Macartan’s chapel of ease at Aghadrumsee. However, a revision of parish boundaries in the Church of Ireland diocese of Clogher created a new Protestant parish of Aghadrumsee, coupled with the adjoining sub-districts of Clogh in Fermanagh and Drumsnatt in Monaghan. It disrupted the ancient and common ecclesiastical boundaries that encompassed our respective home places, and that had us once as fellow parishoners, just as the redrawing of political boundaries consigned us to separate jurisdictions. I mention this because identities are blurred hereabouts, a confusion of history, geography, politics and faith that defies a single perspective. While my world encompassed an Ireland that was whole and indivisible, the world of Ulster loyalism is bounded firmly by defensible frontiers around the narrow ground that must be held by force of arms. So while the border was an unwelcome presence in my world, it marked the limits of Arlene’s. Through my border, I saw family and friends. Beyond hers lurked danger and threat.

Italian scholar Claudio Magris observes that ‘A border has two sides to it, it’s ambiguous: at one moment it is a bridge on which to meet, at another, a barrier of rejection.’5 Even that bipartite perspective fails to capture the multiplicity of confounding realities that are inherent in the border that snakes its way out of Carlingford Lough and meanders back to the sea at Lough Foyle. That’s a distance of almost 500 kilometres (310 miles), roughly the diagonal length of the entire island, north to south, from Torr Head in Antrim to Mizen Head in Cork. Perhaps it defies explanation beyond the personal experience of living there, or here and there, for there are many differences of location, practice and experience.

A good place to start, however, is to realise that the partition of Ireland did not result in two homogenous jurisdictions diametrically opposed to each other. Indeed, the border was created as a stopgap measure, subject to revision or even removal, under both the Government of Ireland Act (1920) and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of the following year. It wasn’t a standard one-size-fits-all international boundary imposed or foisted on the Irish people by a vindictive English colonial garrison. It was an integral part of the negotiated treaty accepted by a majority of Irish voters in 1922, its anomalies and errors to be determined and rectified by a boundary commission. It was made permanent at the behest of William T. Cosgrave’s Irish Free State government in the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Agreement of December 1925. That forgotten pact amounted to a grubby financial sell-out. The provisional frontier remained as it was, without remedy for the numerous anomalies in social, economic, geographic and political displacement on both sides. In return, the Free State was excused from its share of the Imperial debt from the Great War, estimated at £150 million, although critics of the deal pointed out that this was more than offset by Ireland’s £3 billion counter-claim for damage done by Crown forces during the War of Independence.6

So the border slipped into place as the rest of Ireland was otherwise engaged. Contrary to the prevailing and mistaken belief that the subsequent civil war was fought over partition, there is strong evidence that the border barely affected daily life in the rest of the nationalist state that tore itself apart over an oath of allegiance and then bedded down behind customs barriers. Since then, historians and other commentators have assiduously avoided a point raised succinctly by Maureen Wall in 1966:

It is astonishing to find so little attention paid to the Ulster question in the printed reports of the debates which took place in Dáil Éireann between the signing of the Treaty and its adoption by a majority of the Dáil on January 7, 1922. Of 338 pages of debates, nine only are devoted to the subject of partition, and of these nine pages, the deputies for County Monaghan – Blythe, MacEntee and O’Duffy – contributed two-thirds.7

Arthur Griffith, who negotiated and signed the Treaty, did not even mention partition in the debates, while his co-signatory Michael Collins proffered direct talks with the unionists, or the boundary commission set out in Article 12, as the best options to replace coercion with goodwill in uniting the country. De Valera, leader of the trenchant opposition, presented his alternative Document No. 2 with the exact same terms on the North as the Treaty.8 Little wonder that all the IRA’s northern forces, apart from Frank Aiken’s Fourth Northern Division, backed Collins and the Treaty. Aiken prevaricated, torn between his Armagh roots and his Dundalk stronghold. Among those declaring unequivocally for Collins and the Free State was the IRA’s Fifth Northern Division, with its headquarters in Clones.

Yet from the start, the border was used and exploited by both sides as and when it suited them. It was never rectified, yet it was never static. It changed and evolved over a turbulent century in which its very existence was a constant catalyst of conflict. It corralled a sizeable nationalist population into the North, and excluded some 70,000 Ulster unionists in the South from their covenanted brethren – brethren who then appropriated the name ‘Ulster’ exclusively as their own. It disrupted identity and caused lasting trauma, defined as ‘when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors, when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger’.9

Often there were much stronger ties to those on the other side than those on your own. There were sizeable minorities, people who felt betrayed, unwanted and discounted, people denied a voice in the new dispensations. They languished in that liminal space that all frontiers become, hoping that somebody would notice and make things better. Yet their fate would always be determined by those far away, in the centres of power. Rather than creating a shop window of progressive modernity, the Irish government presented shoddy neglect along its border. It seemed as if notice was taken only when Dublin’s security was threatened.

I was a toddler when huge steel girders were driven deep through the road’s surface at the Aqueduct Bridge on the Ulster Canal at the edge of town. Other cross-border routes were also ‘spiked’, including at Kilrooskey, a Fermanagh townland that loops into Monaghan just north of the town, cutting off my uncle Eugene McCabe’s farm. I have a memory of him building a small link road through a corner of a field to provide a circuitous escape route to town. He called it the Khyber Pass, in memory of another north-west frontier road. It is still there today, skirting the house where my maternal grandmother settled for her final years between two daughters and their growing families. The house is divided by the border, and that proud County Clare woman relished my dad’s cheeky observation that she slept ‘with her head in the Free State and her backside in the North’. When Donald, one of my brothers, came home to work in the family drapery business, he moved into the house with his young Dublin wife at a time when the security situation was hot again. Gillian lived in dread of the helicopter swoops and the voices of British squaddies on reconnaissance patrols in the dead of night. They moved into the town as soon as they could.

The spikes circumscribed my childhood world in a ring of steel. They were unnatural barriers between neighbours, friends, family. Like Uncle Eugene, we found ways around them, but they were constant reminders that our freedom of movement was curtailed by a line we could not otherwise see. So from my earliest age, I realised we lived in a frontier town, and these steel impediments marked the border even more forcefully than the customs posts on the Newtownbutler Road where motorists had to have their passbooks checked. Yet there were some marginal benefits of living right on the cusp of another jurisdiction, such as the border shops that offered Opal Fruits, Mars bars, Spangles and other confections unavailable on our side. We had television for a full decade before RTÉ began broadcasting down south. Initially, it was just BBC, but when UTV went on air from Belfast’s Havelock House on Halloween 1959, we found a use at last for the rotary channel switch on the Murphy TV set. By then, we were thoroughly immersed in the culture, current affairs and social mores of Britain and its outpost in the north of Ireland. When RTÉ came along, it seemed amateurish, parochial and dated by contrast with Cathy McGowan’s Ready, Steady, Go on UTV, BBC’s Juke Box Jury and, of course, Top of the Pops. We were there for the gritty start of Granada TV’s Coronation Street and TV hosts such as David Frost inured us against Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show from Dublin.

Our cultural influences and sense of the world transcended a line on somebody else’s map. We may have been living in a small rural town, but our aspirations were of cosmopolitan sophistication. Even Bobby from Brookeborough, on the fringe of our Fermanagh hinterland in the 1960s, regarded Clones as ‘an outpost of American glamour and Sunday freedoms’.10 While outsiders saw us inhabiting the outer extremity of their world, our parish universe straddled two counties and two states, and we forged from this a common identity as borderers. So we were affronted by the new impediments imposed on our lines of communication. Yet our border was always hard, because it intruded politically in communities that are almost indistinguishable, differentiating people with the same beliefs and allegiances, history and traditions, culture and attitudes. For a century, we were branded as different, corralled into political entities not of our choosing and condemned to peripheral neglect.

This is the part of Ireland through which the Ulster Canal ran, long before the border was even conceived. It is the route through which I have chosen to tell the story of a century of partition. For this is where the border pokes north Monaghan into the soft underbelly of Northern Ireland, a salient that British military strategists dubbed ‘the spur’. Its history as a border region began in turmoil a century ago, and it has rarely quietened since. The border lies within 10 kilometres of everyone who lives in this place, intruding in their daily lives, and creating tiny communities that defy the narrative of separate people and places. The passage between Lough Neagh and Lough Erne is also roughly the course that my paternal grandparents took by rail a century ago when they moved to the bustling town of Clones. My grandfather, Owen, had been manager of Hoseys’ drapery shop in Portadown, Country Armagh; my grandmother, Catherine, a milliner, had also worked in the drapery business in Portadown, as a floor supervisor in Elliott and Stevenson. They moved to Clones to open their own drapery shop, and raised a family of four. My late father, Eugene, their third child and the family’s first ‘Free Stater’, came into the world on Christmas Day 1922, as the dust settled on the turmoil and strife of the War of Independence, and the ‘temporary’ frontier was imposed. He was born with the border and we, his family, have been living with it ever since.

1. Border Hopscotch

Castle Saunderson to Clones – 14 km

The contrast in architectural styles could hardly be more striking. One is a low modern building of decorative brick and grey cladding that squats at the far end of a vast car park; the other is a stout Scottish baronial castle being slowly consumed from within and without by vegetation. The first is the new home for Scouting Ireland, and has its fleur-de-lis logo emblazoned on the gable; the second is the former home of the father of Ulster unionism, forever facing north to the Promised Land. They share the Castle Saunderson estate, straddling the ages, the traditions and the border between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. This is the starting point for a voyage along the Ulster Canal. If current plans for restoration come to fruition, it will be the first port of call for pleasure craft on the Ulster Canal, the final link of an inland navigation system connecting Limerick, Waterford and Dublin to Coleraine and Belfast. Until that happens, the only means of traversing much of the canal’s route is on foot.

I set off from the car park along a tree-lined path and soon come upon the cluster of castle buildings that still preside defiantly over the River Finn below. Essentially a large two-storey dwelling, the main house has decorative battlements, corbelled turrets, inlaid coats-of-arms and other features of a bygone age. In the townland of Portagh, County Cavan, it sits on the site of a former castle of the O’Reilly clan of Breffni. Precisely when the Saundersons took up residence is a matter of conjecture. According to a family history,1 when a plastered-over stone was uncovered it revealed a coat of arms dated 1573. That belied the myth of family origin that had been nurtured for generations, confirming the family was originally named Sanderson and from Scotland, rather than being related to the much grander Saundersons of Saxby, Lincolnshire. The ‘u’ was added to the name in the mid-eighteenth century in an unsuccessful bid for the discontinued Anglo-Irish title, Viscount of Castleton. Then the discovery of a headstone at Desertcreat churchyard right beside the consecration site of the O’Neills at Tullyhogue in County Tyrone provided a possible ancestor in ‘Alexander Sandirson, born in Scotland, a soldier in Belgium, a leader of horse and foot in Poland; in Ireland, a justice of the peace and three times high sheriff of the county’ who died in December 1633. The headstone bore the same coat of arms as the stone discovered at Castle Saunderson, which also featured at the home of the Sandersons of Cloverhill, just a few miles away in County Cavan. Whatever their origins, according to the family history, the Sandersons/Saundersons once commanded an estate that stretched for over 20 miles ‘in a straight line’ and bounded the equally impressive Upper Lough Erne estates of the Butlers of Lanesborough House and the Crichtons of Crom Castle, both in County Fermanagh.

The family proved staunch defenders of the Protestant crown in south Ulster. So when Richard Talbot, the first earl of Tyrconnell set about raising troops to support the Jacobite cause, Colonel Robert Sanderson assembled his Protestant neighbours and led them in an invasion of Cavan courthouse during the quarter sessions of 1688.

‘By whose authority do ye act?’ Sanderson demanded.

‘By that of his Majesty King James,’ the chairman replied.

‘We acknowledge no such authority,’ Sanderson declared, as he cleared the courthouse.

For this, he was proscribed and a price of £200 put on his head. Having failed to escape to England, he returned to his castle, assembled his Protestant neighbours and prepared for siege when Tyrconnell moved his forces north in 1689, laying siege to Derry and Enniskillen. Sanderson found his route to Enniskillen blocked by the Jacobites led by Lord Mountcashel (Justin MacCarthy), so he marched his men to Coleraine, where the Protestant ‘army of the north-east’ was mustering. On his departure, a Jacobite detachment led by Piers Butler (Lord Galmoy) destroyed his castle, drove off his livestock and burned every house and barn on the estate. The family history records:

This act of destruction was bitterly avenged, for when the Enniskilleners sallied forth and utterly defeated MacCarthy’s army at Newtownbutler, four thousand fugitives fled from the battle towards Castle Saunderson. A party of Enniskillen horse, making a forced march, got to Wattlebridge ahead of them; and there under the smouldering ruins of the castle, the whole four thousands were driven into the river and perished, not one man escaping.2

There is little evidence now of a bloodbath in the quiet stream separating the Castle Saunderson estate from Derrykerrib Island on the opposite shore, which is in Fermanagh. The island’s approximately 500 acres is separated by narrow channels of the Erne and Finn rivers, but connected by a road bridge just west of Wattlebridge. While the original Ulster Canal commercial navigation eschewed Castle Saunderson for a dedicated channel from Derrykerrib Lough, an inlet of Lough Erne, the €2 million excavation recently begun at this end of the canal will redirect it along a channel of the Finn River past the estate. This work, scheduled to be completed in April 2018, is projected as the first phase in the overall project of reopening the Ulster Canal, according to Irish government minister Heather Humphreys when she visited the construction site at Derrykerrib Island.3

Back in 1841, it was on Derrykerrib Island that the final phase of the navigation was completed, at a cost of £230,000, far in excess of the original budget. The project had been dogged by false economies from the outset, according to Brian Cassell’s pictorial history of the canal.4 The original proposal presented by John Killaly in 1815 to the Directors General of Inland Navigation was for 35 miles of canal with twenty-two locks costing £223,000. This was revised to a canal with eighteen locks and a cost of £160,050. When Thomas Telford was asked to review the commercial aspects of the plan, he insisted on a new survey, which increased the number of locks to twenty-six, but these were shoehorned into the budget by reducing their width to 12 feet. That was 18 inches smaller than the narrowest locks on the Lagan and Newry canals, meaning cargo would have to be reloaded onto smaller craft. The canal opened in phases from 1838, but it never attracted the projected traffic. When the final and narrowest lock was in place at Derrykerrib – it was only 11 feet and 8 inches wide – the canal was ready to receive the projected traffic from the Shannon-Erne waterway of the Ballinamore-Ballyconnell canal, which was also being completed in the same year, although it would not be navigable until almost twenty years later because of budgetary problems, disputes with millers and fishermen and even labour shortages.5 But by then, truly, the ship was spoilt for a ha’porth of tar.

Perhaps today’s rerouting of the canal so that it passes Castle Saunderson will spur the rediscovery of that place, which should provide an enticing diversion, replete with the history of Ulster. For it was there that Colonel Edward Saunderson entertained house guests who included fellow stalwarts of opposition to home rule in the later decades of the nineteenth century. A former Liberal MP for Cavan, a seat formerly held by his father Colonel Alexander Saunderson, Edward was swept aside in the Parnellite tide of nationalism in the 1880s. However, he was the ‘darling of the Orangemen’, and he captured the North Armagh seat for the Conservatives in the 1885 election, when many of his electoral divisions achieved a 93 per cent turnout of voters.6 By the following January, he had organised his fellow Conservatives – who now held sixteen of Ulster’s seats against the nationalists’ seventeen – into a ‘parliamentary Ulster party’ that was ‘volubly supported’ by the prime minister, Lord Salisbury.7 On the other side, nationalist MPs John Dillon and Timothy Daniel O’Sullivan dismissed them. The latter, remembered primarily as the songwriter who penned the rousing ballad ‘God Save Ireland’, delivered his put-down lyrically, dubbing the loyalists as ‘mere Saundersonian slap-dash, with about as much substance in it as a soap-bubble’. It was a gross underestimation of the colonel nicknamed the ‘dancing Dervish’, who continued to lead his group of about twenty Ulster unionists until his death in 1906, blocking home rule in the process. He was acknowledged as ‘witty and charming’ but devoid of business sense and averse to reading legislation with which he disagreed publicly, including the 1896 land bill that would result in the forced division of his own estates.8 His lasting political legacy, however, was in acting as mentor for the dynamic and precise Edward Carson, who succeeded him as leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance and its Ulster Unionist Council.

Today, Colonel Edward lies in repose in a small and rather nondescript grave in the lee of the chapel, on the estate he inherited from his father in 1857. The headstone epitaph, ‘Love Never Faileth’, is faded, just like the memory of the man, who should be honoured by those who proclaim the tenets of Ulster resistance to home rule that he initiated and championed during the crisis of the 1880s. The family history printed for private circulation in 1936, in which he is remembered as ‘a truly great man’ whose ‘life is indelibly inscribed in the history of Northern Ireland’, includes the observation that he very narrowly missed ‘by ten minutes’ being appointed as chief secretary of Ireland by Lord Salisbury, pipped at the post by Arthur Balfour.

Most engagingly, Colonel Edward also comes across as an entertaining host much beloved by his extended family. Among his party tricks, he would stand sideways to the billiard table and, putting one foot up on the edge, stand up on it ‘without apparent effort’. Another trick was to stand with his back to a door, clasping his hands over the top, and then raise his legs and body quite slowly until he ended up sitting on top of the door. House guests, including comic and romantic songwriter Percy French, loved to stroll in the bog garden created by the colonel’s wife, Helena Demoleyns, daughter of the third Lord Ventry. Nor were his guests spared from the challenge of physical feats. An old friend, Thomas Cosby Burrowes, recalled how male house guests were not allowed to go to their beds by the staircase: ‘They had to shin up the pillars which supported the landing above! Unless they could accomplish this by no means easy feat there was no bed for them that night.’9

Colonel Edward’s son Major Somerset Saunderson inherited the estate in 1906 and lived there as a bachelor ‘in peace and quiet’ until 1914, when ‘an outrageous attempt was made … to coerce Ulster into a new scheme of home rule’. The family history records his leading role in ‘preparations for defence’. Somerset married late, and his American wife Marie Countess Larrisch spent lavishly on improvements to the castle until the Anglo-Irish Treaty, when Cavan was ‘severed from Ulster and all that Ulster meant’. In the family’s absence, the castle was raided for arms by IRA Volunteers based in Clones, including many Fermanagh men from the Wattlebridge company. Subsequently, the paramilitary RIC Auxiliaries were garrisoned at the castle. When they left, it was stripped bare of doors, windows, lead from the roof, water pipes and anything else of value. Major Somerset abandoned it to the Free State, and in the process declared poignantly, ‘Now I have no country!’

Castle Saunderson lay abandoned and forgotten for decades. When it was acquired in the early 1980s, I visited it as a reporter for the Sunday Press newspaper and wrote about the refurbishment and plans for its use. Shortly thereafter, it was raided by Gardaí and a large arms dump was discovered. A short time later, it was engulfed in flames once more. The castle was gutted and destroyed for the final time in that conflagration, although the estate chapel remains a serene resting place for the Saundersons and their role in the history of Ulster and Ireland. Long gone are Castle Saunderson’s days of glory, described in 1739 by Rev. Dr William Henry of the Royal Dublin Society and Trinity College:

The situation of this seat is chosen with both spirit and taste; it stands on the top of a hill, which commands all around, and risen high over the south side of the river; at the bottom of the hill are some plantations; and, from the castle to the skirts all around, the hill descends in a verdant, spacious lawn – here and there interspersed with single large forest trees. The boldness of its aspect makes it naturally a stronghold, and gives it an uncommon air of grandeur; it looks majestically over the river to the north, and a great part of Lough Erne to the west.10

Today, not even the shoreline is negotiable until the canal restoration work is completed, so I am forced into a digression along the road. From the estate chapel, the avenue crosses a small stream and runs through an open gate that forms the border between Cavan and Fermanagh; that is, between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. It is the first of several border crossings on the Ulster Canal route of about 10 kilometres to Clones. Emerging from the historic estate onto the main road almost precisely where it ceases to be the South’s N54 and becomes the North’s A3 is a shock to the senses. The ornate gates are clamped into a cluster of commercial shopfronts that form the forecourt for P&J Fuels, a service station proclaiming ‘LowLowFuels’ on its huge green canopy, and offering a fast pump for kerosene heating oil and another shopfront for ‘Fireworks’. It’s a huckster’s welcome to the lakelands county of Fermanagh, a tacky roadside enclave that jostles for space and attention as heavy traffic whizzes by. For the next mile of my walk along the Ulster Canal route, I will hug the hedge, dodging the side mirrors of vans and lorries on the main road connecting the north-east of the island of Ireland with the west coast and midlands.

The plans for the restoration of the canal and its towpath will not encompass this blot on the landscape, and future trekkers and navigators can look forward to a channel quite removed from the interface of Leggykelly, County Cavan, and Drumboganagh Glebe in Fermanagh. Before leaving, however, it is worth pausing to recall one notable death in the recent conflict, that of the first and most senior police officer from the Republic to be killed in the conflict that raged along the border. Garda Inspector Sam Donegan, a native of Ballintampen, Ballymacormack, County Longford, led a detachment of police and army from Cavan to investigate a suspect device left on the road at this very point on 8 June 1972. 11 The booby-trapped device was actually about 30 yards inside Northern Ireland, but Inspector Donegan crossed the border to examine it. In his book about southern border security in the 1970s, Bombs, Bullets and the Border, Patrick Mulroe noted that although Inspector Donegan’s death caused ‘shock in the locality,’ it subsequently ‘did not receive the same national coverage as other Garda deaths’. 12 Another account described the media coverage as ‘pitifully low’.13 I recall the incident well and the speculation that swirled through the locality in the absence of any arrests or trial coverage. One newspaper incorrectly reported that the blast was detonated by remote control. Unconfirmed reports at the time suggested that the box had the word ‘Bomb’ painted on its side, perhaps a bizarre suggestion that it was a hoax and this allegedly prompted Inspector Donegan to kick it dismissively. The box actually was connected to a gelignite bomb, and the garda and an Irish Army lieutenant were caught in the blast.14

Inspector Donegan was rushed to Cavan Hospital, where he died from his wounds. He was 61 years of age, married and the father of six children. Both the Official and the Provisional wings of the IRA active at that time denied responsibility, but suspicion fell on the latter. It was a huge funeral, presided over by the Catholic Bishop of Kilmore with nine chief superintendents, fifty-three superintendents and 150 other Gardaí leading the cortege, while six Garda inspectors flanked the tricolor-draped coffin and six sergeants acted as the pall-bearers. There was an army guard of honour and Minister for Justice Des O’Malley, Garda Commissioner Michael Wymes and the chairman of Northern Ireland’s Police Federation were in attendance.

There had been fewer, less exalted mourners in attendance when 19-year-old Thomas Francis McCann had been buried only a few months previously, in February 1972.15 Although a Dubliner, like many young working-class Irishmen before him, he joined the British Army’s Royal Army Ordnance Corps. Perhaps it was his misfortune to be sent to Fermanagh when he put in a request on compassionate grounds to be nearer his mother so he could visit her regularly in Dublin. He was abducted shortly after one such visit. While nobody claimed the abduction and murder of Private McCann, suspicion in this case fell on the Official IRA, mainly because the Dublin teenager was not included in the Provisionals’ admission of responsibility for three similar abductions and killings in which the bodies were dumped on the border. In this case, the hooded remains were left by the roadside here on the border near Newtownbutler, in which direction my Ulster Canal walk now takes me.

To the left as I walk along the twisting route of the A3, the baronial battlements of Castle Saunderson jut above the trees beyond a thin gleaming line of water that snakes its way through the brown and green landscape. A small traditional cottage to the right has a ‘for sale’ sign attached, but seems to offer little enticement to the heavy traffic trundling by. Behind the cottage, a narrow road veers off in the opposite direction towards Redhills, which enjoyed a few moments in the sunshine during the darkness of the Troubles. In the early 1990s, the tiny Cavan village became the setting for two Hollywood films, both written by Shane Connaughton, who grew up there when his father was the local Garda sergeant. He describes, in his 1995 book A Border Diary, his homecoming experience and impressions of a brief period that straddled the momentous announcement of the IRA ceasefire on 31 August 1994.16 He places Redhills in ‘the middle of nowhere’, noting that the late English film director Peter Yates described this rolling drumlin terrain as ‘buttery country’. I prefer the description of poet Paul Muldoon, who calls it ‘curvaceous’.17 Or Connaughton’s observation that the land hereabouts is:

impervious to maps. What appeared plain on paper was on the ground an orgy of political and geographical confusion. Cavan and Monaghan in the South were locked into Fermanagh in the North, like two dogs trying to cover the one hot bitch.18

Connaughton traversed this tripartite terrain trying to remain upright:

It was all a question of balance. Keeping your feet on the ground. Or landing on them after flight. Learning to walk on edges. The road they were on was a tightrope: Cavan one minute. Fermanagh the next. Customs men lay in wait. Squad cars patrolled … The closer you were on the ground, the more dangerous it was. Yet danger sharpened the senses.19

At a fork in the road a bit further on from the way to Redhills, we veer to the right on the A3. The road less travelled (B533) goes straight ahead to Wattlebridge and Newtownbutler just beyond. That was the main road from Dublin and the South into Fermanagh and south Donegal during much of the recent Troubles, after Aghalane Bridge was demolished by loyalists in 1972 following several IRA attacks, and, at the behest of the British Army, wasn’t rebuilt.20 It wasn’t always so quiet.

On 22 October 1972, the IRA ambushed and killed Private Robin Bell at Drumguillagh, just north of Newtownbutler. A 21-year-old part-time British soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), he was also a farmer, travelling with his father and brother to an out-farm. When Robin was shot dead, the other brother – also UDR – returned fire with his pistol, while their wounded father drove off. The IRA ambushers abandoned their vehicle a short distance away, and police said they ‘escaped over the border by boat’.21

The following day, a military ‘brick’ patrol from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders visited the farm of Michael Naan at Augnnahinch, between Newtownbutler and Wattlebridge. Naan, 31, a prominent member of the Fermanagh Civil Rights Association, was stabbed to death, as was his 23-year-old farm labourer, Andrew Murray, in what would become known as the Pitchfork Murders from early reports that the killers had used a farm implement. During the 1979 investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders in England, a former soldier from the Argylls came forward and admitted his part with others who used a Bowie knife in the ‘frenzied’ murder of the two farmers. Three others were convicted, along with their company commander, who pleaded guilty to covering up the incident, and received a suspended sentence.22 Since then, further investigation has shown this wasn’t the action of a maverick unit of the British Army, and the instigation and cover-up of the murders went all the way to the top of the military command chain in Northern Ireland and beyond.23

Local unionist politicians such as John Brooke, son of former Northern Ireland Premier Lord Brookeborough and successor to his title, blamed the violence on Dublin’s failure to secure the border, and demanded hot pursuit of suspects by crown forces.24 The accusations of lax border security dogged Dublin governments from the mid-1970s. A false narrative took hold, fed by selective fact and fiction. It told of a war of ‘genocide’ along the border, the killing fields of an interface between loyal Ulster and its IRA enemies, a war of attrition aimed at eldest sons of Protestant landowners. At its root, however, was the withdrawal of British regular troops for political reasons and the British policy of ‘Ulsterisation’, which pushed the RUC and part-time UDR into the front line. Some have argued that ‘Ulsterisation’ was a military strategy to deal with the ‘cell structure’ adopted by the IRA after its 1975 ceasefire. However, at a meeting with new Secretary of State Humphrey Atkins in June 1979, British Chief of General Staff Sir Edwin Bramall said the army was ‘eager to reduce the number of soldiers deployed in Northern Ireland as the separation from their families was leading men to leave the army’.25

Part-time UDR and RUC reservists served on the front line while continuing the regular jobs and routines that made them easy targets, even after they left the security forces. So in the first half of 1980, the deaths in Newtownbutler of Robert Crilly (60) at his garage, Victor Morrow (61) as he waited for a lift to work, and Richard Latimer (39) in his hardware shop, as well as the deaths of two local policemen, sent shockwaves through the loyalist community, which experienced them as ‘an assault on the community as a whole’, and ‘the pathology of violence-induced fear, hate and suspicion … reached chronic levels in 1979 and 1980 as the Provisionals launched their most intense campaign along the border since the early 1970s’.26 When Ian Paisley took up the cause of Fermanagh Protestants, he spoke of ‘genocide’, alleging that the IRA had drawn up ‘a list of prominent Protestants to be murdered’. That insinuation gained added traction after the Impartial Reporter headline of 1 May 1980: ‘It’s Plain Genocide’.27 Church of Ireland Primate Dr John Armstrong was more cautious, saying merely that ‘there seemed to be a disturbing pattern in the killings. Sometimes the person killed would be the natural successor to the farm, like the elder son’, but ‘it is difficult to find evidence of a plan to eliminate Protestants’.28

When Richard Latimer’s widow Bonnie met the new prime minister in June 1980, she told Margaret Thatcher that while attacks were planned by ‘local sympathisers’, the gunmen were from the ‘safe haven’ of the Republic, where Gardaí ‘openly admitted to drinking with the IRA in public houses … unable to arrest them because they did not have the authority to do so from Dublin’. Then on Wednesday, 23 June 1980, Paisley joined Official Unionist Party leader Jim Molyneaux on the platform of a Newtownbutler rally organised by the Fermanagh United Protestant Action Group for the Defence of Family and Home.29 He declared that if all cross-border roads were not closed, Protestants would do whatever was necessary to protect themselves. British politicians decided to block the roads once more, although senior security personnel believed that the border could never be sealed effectively and the ‘IRA can cross … almost at will’.30 Shortly thereafter, huge military checkpoints were constructed at Wattlebridge and at Kilturk on the main A34 road to Clones.

This corner of Fermanagh had seen troubles long before the 1970s. In the War of Independence, the Fifth Northern (Monaghan) Division of the Irish Republican Army included an entire company from this district. Among them was Commandant Matt Fitzpatrick, who joined up as a teenage IRA Volunteer after 1916 and was followed into the ranks by three younger brothers – John James, Frank and Patrick. They took part in several major engagements hereabouts, including the February 1920 capture of Shantonagh RIC barracks in County Monaghan, the first such engagement in Ulster.31 Also involved in that operation were such IRA luminaries as Peadar O’Donnell, Ernie O’Malley and Eoin O’Duffy. In his seminal book about the War of Independence, O’Malley notes that the raid resulted in the capture of ‘nine bright carbines, bayonets, revolvers, hand grenades, Verey lights and ammunition’.32 Over the following two years, the Fitzpatrick brothers were involved in practically every military operation along the new frontier. They were arrested, escaped, wounded, healed and promoted. The family home at Kilgarrow, occupied by their elderly parents, was burnt out in reprisal. Then, on 11 February 1922, after a meteoric rise to acting Commandant of the Fifth Northern Division of the Free State Army, Matt Fitzpatrick was killed by the opening shot of a gun battle that became known as the ‘Clones Affray’. He was just 25, and, according to former commanders, a pivotal player in securing the northern divisions in the Treaty split that led to Civil War.

Five and a half years later, on 28 September 1927, Clones solicitor Baldwin Murphy wrote to the Ministry of Defence in Dublin on behalf of his client, Mrs Mary Jane Fitzpatrick of Kilgarrow, County Fermanagh, enquiring about her pension entitlements as a dependent of the late commandant:

The last time he was in the family house before his death the deceased gave £10 to his mother. This was out of the pay he was receiving from his military office. Up to the year 1917 the deceased worked … as a road contractor and while he was at this form of work he lived at home and regularly gave the entire profits therefrom, apart from what it would take to clothe him, to his mother our client. In some years, we are instructed, these profits amounted to up to £50. From 1917 up to the date he was appointed commandant in the Free State Army, he served as a volunteer and during the entire period he was almost entirely engaged on active service and was unable to do any work of a civil character.33

A reply to the Clones solicitor signed by ‘J.J.H.’ for the Army Finance Officer notes that a gratuity of £150 had already been awarded to her husband Edward as a ‘final settlement’ and payment of a weekly or monthly allowance was made ‘only in necessitous or special circumstances’.34 Evidence showing Fitzpatrick’s parents had been left virtually destitute was presented. A letter dated 30 May 1923 from Major General Dan Hogan, GOC of Dublin Command at Collins Barracks and Fitzpatrick’s immediate predecessor in charge of the Fifth Northern, certified that they ‘suffered very severely financially and must now be in urgent need of substantial compensation’. Then aged 69 and 72, the parents ‘dare not return to the County Fermanagh’, where their property had been destroyed by crown forces. This meant they had to employ others to work their land while renting a cottage in Clones. As a consequence, they ‘have been impoverished and were obliged to borrow a large sum of money to carry on’. General Hogan was backed by a letter from the Office of Garda Commissioner dated 27 February 1924 and signed by Eoin O’Duffy, pointing out ‘the exceptional circumstances’:

There were four brothers in the family – Matt who was killed, John James recently released from the [prison ship] Argenta broken down in health, Frank who also did a term of imprisonment and is now, I believe, a military, or an acting military governor of one of the prisons, and Patrick presently a lieutenant in the Intelligence Department stationed at Clones. The four brothers were the backbone of the Wattlebridge Company, Monaghan Brigade – three took part in the taking of Shantonagh Barracks and all four had to fly [sic] from home afterwards. Their home was burned down by the Specials, and a claim for compensation was refused by the judges of the Northern government. The aged parents rented a cottage in County Monaghan and are now pretty destitute. Owing to the part the family took in the pre-truce days, and owing to their loyalty to the present government, it is pitiful to see them in their present humiliation.

Yet those interventions did not sway the Free State decision makers, who stuck by the £150 having been paid in ‘full and final settlement’. As I continue my search for evidence of the Ulster Canal’s ghost, I wonder that if this was done to friends and supporters, what was that Free State capable of doing to its foes?

The road takes in a huge corner that seems to go full circle in a clockwise direction in the townland of Anaghmore. It almost encompasses an impressive hilltop cottage to my left that faces onto a small, pretty lake below. The Ordnance Survey map tells me it was the rectory for the Church of Ireland parish of Drummully, whose place of worship lies a short distance ahead, but on the other side of the border. The big corner ends in a dip down to a cluster of riverside buildings around the old six-arch stone bridge at Gortnacarrow, spanning the River Finn’s channel with lots of allowance for full spate. A stream of traffic trundles across it in convoys of heavy-goods vehicles heading west. I walk across the welcome footpath, veering to the right on the far shore at a small cluster of commercial buildings that includes a home bakery business, and set off on the Drumgramph Road into the Fermanagh townland of Clogher.

Almost immediately, I come upon the first Ulster Canal stores of my trek. These distinctive cut-stone buildings were the nodes of the inland navigation system, the collection points where barges took farm produce on board and where their clients collected coal and other cargoes for local distribution. A centre of commerce at one time, the building is now derelict, its open windows barred, upper and bottom doors barricaded against intrusion. Through one open window of the top floor, a gaping hole is visible in the slated roof. Slightly recessed to the side, the former store manager’s house is also derelict and overshadowed by the grey steel walls of the modern industrial building next door used by Gortnacarrow Tyres.

Today’s commercial hub is just a couple of hundred metres down the road in a large gravel-covered open space with an equally expansive car park… but only on Saturdays. Then this isolated location is transformed into Clogher Market, a tented city bazaar of stalls and chip vans. Clothing and tools abound between outlets selling pictures and statues, bikes and balloons, toilet tissue and laundry powder, curtain fabrics and curiosities, crockery and lampshades, toys and trinkets. Row upon row of striped awnings are interspersed with vans, lorries and cars from which traders haul their wares onto makeshift counters or clothes rails, or simply strew them on the ground. Some are equipped with huge trays of neatly arranged merchandise; others make do with disintegrating cardboard boxes. Several stalls offering duvets and fabric-and-foam pet beds simply pile them at the edge of the walkways where early-bird customers scan what is on offer. Although they vary in age, the clients seem a more uniform bunch than the traders, who range from the decidedly local to a strong representation with roots in the Indian sub-continent. Huddled in anoraks and hooded jackets, the latter have the routine of regular attendance at this or similar markets.

With the aroma of frying burgers and onions in the morning air, some quaff from Styrofoam beakers of tea or coffee and the stallholders hunker down for the day. The backdrop of one unattended stall is a large Irish tricolor of green, white and orange, emblazoned with an Easter lily republican crest with Dublin’s General Post Office in the background and the words, ‘Irish Republican Army 1916 Undefeated 2016’. Amid the jumble of plastic containers, boxes and a pile of other merchandise yet to be arranged, sits an incongruous Union Jack mug. As W.B. Yeats might observe, Clogher Market is focused clearly on fumbling in the greasy till and adding the ha’pence to the pence.

This is one of a series of established border markets that have drawn customers from the far reaches of the midlands and south of Ireland, dipping their toes tentatively into Northern Ireland to secure a bargain, but seldom venturing beyond the market sites here or in Jonesborough, County Armagh. It thrives on its precarious location between two jurisdictions, and the reluctance of law-enforcement agencies to ensure that nothing untoward is afoot.

Shane Connaughton described it more than twenty years ago as ‘higglers, hucksters, tinkers and shopkeepers from all over Ulster’, who ‘gather here to sell their wares to thousands of bargain hunters, buying anything from third-hand tools to vegetables, bread clothes and holy pictures’.35 He noted then that the RUC didn’t venture this far for fear of IRA attacks, but that there was a British army checkpoint ‘over the hills along the Enniskillen road’, where the soldiers rarely leave their post except to return to their base by helicopter. The checkpoint at Wattlebridge is long gone, along with all those squaddies once consigned to duty on the fringe of the precarious north-west frontier.

The RUC has gone too, replaced in 2001 by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) under the new dispensation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent St Andrews Agreement that prompted Sinn Féin to support the new policing structures. In November 2011, the PSNI mounted a large raid on Clogher Market, arresting nine stallholders on a combined 118 charges of selling fake products and infringing copyright on brands including Nike, Adidas, Audi, Canterbury, Ralph Lauren, Hollister and Tiffany.36 Those arrested were from Longford, Leitrim, Lurgan, Omagh, Lisnaskea and Newtownbutler. There had been a similar raid in 2007 when the police seized £1.5 million worth of fake goods. On that occasion, Inspector Roy Robinson warned that these peddlers of fake goods were paying no taxes and hurting their neighbours ‘who are working in legitimate businesses’.37

As I wander around taking occasional photographs, I come under suspicion when I point my camera down a walkway bordered by an array of used tools and farm equipment. A voice from behind calls my attention.

‘You’re not allowed to take pictures here.’

‘They’re just for myself,’ I explain.

‘Doesn’t matter, the stallholders don’t want their pictures taken. You were taking them inside a stall over there.’

‘I took one picture from inside the stall but the camera was pointing out.’

We quibble briefly, me insisting I was just photographing the wares and the general scene, he adamant that any photography was ‘against the rules’. I have already sated my curiosity about Clogher Market, however. Relieved that I’m not confronted by a demand to delete what I have taken, I decide to retreat. In any case, I still have an Ulster Canal to locate and walk.