The Border’s Many Faces

October 3, 2022

From the east coast, the journey to Clones takes you first along speeding motorways, then to winding backroads, through small towns boasting little more than a pub and a church. Behind the scrabbled hedges that line the road lie rolling hills of dank green sod and mud, populated by cattle and sheep, and the occasional home.

I travelled to this small border town for a remembrance and thanksgiving service hosted by the Southeast Fermanagh Foundation, an NGO that provides support for the families of victims of the Troubles. Arriving just as the service started, I caught an address by Michael, the son of a Garda (police in the South), whose father was killed by a bomb in 1972.

Michael was sixty-eight. He painted a picture of his early life, how his family had lived a humble existence in a region where there were few jobs to be found. The explosion was as sudden as it was devastating. It separated his father’s flesh from his bones; barely alive, he was taken to hospital and died that evening. Michael’s voice broke as he recalled the tears, the solemn funeral, the death march of the Gardaí.

The shock waves lasted much longer. Michael suffered pain that few of us can imagine, retreating into a dark place for twelve years. The shadow of the 1972 bombing led to another kind of death in Michael, before spreading onwards to his own children.

Near Crossmaglen, a border town known for its republican leanings, I spoke with Pat Kelly, perhaps the world’s greatest hoarder. Inside his shed, a mini-museum boasts a collection of grenades, uniforms, guns, bullets, posters, banners, and photographs of the border area. “I was involved,” he said with a proud grin, pointing to a black-and-white photo of his younger self removing border installations with a digger. At other times, they blew up fortifications, which would be rebuilt by the British Army the following day.

At a new shopping mall in Dundalk, I chatted with Fergal, a man in his twenties. He travels to the north regularly, to shop or go to a club in Newry. Recently, he was stopped by the Gardaí on his way back. He was indignant; Fergal had never known a border to exist and, unlike his elders, had no memory of facing the muzzle of a gun through the car window. Alison, also in her twenties, said, “I heard there was a war once,” and told me how she liked to shop up north. She had never met a Protestant, but she was sure they were very nice people.

As I left the church in Clones, a tall, fit man in his fifties approached me. Nigel, who had lost two family members to the IRA, was standing beside a friend in a doorway in Belfast when his friend was shot dead. “He was a big man, and I saw the gunman crouching down so he could get him in the stomach,” he said. Today Nigel is a police officer. You’d think he has seen the worst of it; yet today, he told me, he sees more sectarian hatred in young people than ever before.

There is no single border. For some it might as well not exist; for others, it pulses with meaning. Brexit has aroused tensions that never really went away: in the land where Game of Thrones was filmed, the sleeping dragon has one eye open.