Signs of the times

Northern Ireland’s Minister for Regional Development Danny Kennedy was accused this week of being ‘pretty petty’ in his insistence on erecting ‘Welcome to Northern Ireland’ signs on Border road-crossings. At the Frontier Post, we think he’s also being rather picky in choosing nine roads to signpost – at a cost of almost £200 a sign.

Two of the new signs have been uprooted already – both in the Clones-Roslea-Newtownbutler area – and there seems to be general expectations that the others will be vandalised also. The DRD is reported to be on standby to replace the signs in such an event.

The official excuse for the signs, meanwhile, is that they will remind motorists that they are entering another jurisdiction where speed limits are measured in pounds, shillings and pence and not in those foreign ‘European’ currencies. Most motorists can be forgiven for thinking that the signs saying that ‘speed limits are in MPH’ were erected for that very purpose.

So obviously in the interests of road safety, the minister is using taxpayers’ money for a ‘belt and braces’ approach so that motorists can then adjust their speedometer gauges, or something like that.

Dannk K – a belt and braces guy

Meanwhile, here at the Frontier Post, we are somewhat peeved that Minister Kennedy does not come clean and acknowledge that our 2 February blog, Size Matters in Border Rivalry, comparing our border with the one between Scotland and England might have spurred him to action. Obviously the Ulster Unionist Minister was upset by our observation that the much smaller Border across the water is festooned with signage, while ours boasts only a few ‘Fermanagh Welcomes you… Naturally’ signs, as well as some signs on the southern side reminding us – in German, French and English, but not the first official language – to drive on the left.

So besides needing to replace the two signs in the Clones area, the minister has had his signs positioned on the following roads: Strabane-Lifford, Kesh-Pettigo, Aughnacloy-Emyvale, Derrylin-Belturbet, Belleek-Ballyshannon, and even one near Wattlebridge on the road from Clones to Cavan where it makes one of its forays into Fermanagh. Soon also, there will be signs erected on the old road between Newry and Dundalk, on one of the Derry to Letterkenny roads – probably at Bridgend – and another near Middletown on the Armagh-Monaghan road.

We reckon that this leaves only 300 or so roads with no signs to inform motorists that they are crossing the Border and they are welcome to do so!

Mind you, at a cost of about £200 each, the spending on replacement signage for the stipulated roads, should keep a medium-size signage shop and half a dozen DRD road crews busy for a while. It will certainly supplement the work of replacing and restoring the defaced direction signs for ‘Londonderry’.

But it’s good to see that we are all being welcomed along the road to a shared future, even if only on a few choice border crossings. Time was – and not really that long ago – that Unionist politicians seemed hell-bent on keeping our cross-border roads closed. Now Danny K is rolling out the Welcome mat, even if disgruntled locals would prefer to keep their Border location a secret.

Mixing sport and geography

Omagh schoolchildren greet the Olympic flame on its passage through Ireland.

It was probably no more than a slip of the tongue but it spoiled my breakfast… and it has been niggling since. The fact that it was a ‘good news story’ on RTÉ Radio One’s Morning Ireland hardly alleviated the inexplicable feeling of being slighted once more.

Brother boxers keep her lit on the Border.

I didn’t even catch the name of the reporter who informed listeners that the Olympic flame was ‘now in Ireland, if only for a few hours’ after the symbolic handover between fellow Irish Olympians Wayne McCollough and Michael Carruth at the Border on the Newry to Dundalk road.

It jarred because, by no coincidence, I was actually in Ireland yesterday morning to witness the same Olympic flame making its passage through Omagh, having come from Derry City via Strabane before heading off out the Dromore Road towards Enniskillen and a string of other Irish towns and villages.

The feeling of euphoria I had felt since about the passage of the Olympic flame on a symbolic course that included both parts of Ireland was dissipated by the carelessness of yet another ‘professional’ news reporter who can’t even be bothered to look at a map and know the difference between a country and a state.

Jack Kennedy, 15, carries the flame through Omagh.

‘A few hours’ indeed, I thought, my mind tracing the earlier path of the flame from Belfast through Antrim, along the north coast and through each of these six Irish counties in Northern Ireland before its brief interlude in the Republic of Ireland.

Yet such geographical dismissal should be like water off a duck’s back by now, one would think.

For all of my life, I have listened to unionist politicians talk of ‘Ulster’ and the ‘Ulster people’ in a way that pointedly excluded me and all those in Northern Ireland who espoused Irish reunification, not to mention one-third of the actual province of Ulster. Such geographical and social selectivity was always deliberate, however, a contrived formula to bestow historical pedigree and political legitimacy on the partition of Ireland.

It was anathema to news reporting in most of Ireland, of course. Reporters were reminded forcibly by editors, who were sticklers for ‘House Style’ back then, that there were very precise rules on these matters.

Standards appear have slipped since the Good Friday Agreement (or ‘Belfast Agreement’ in Irish Times house style). And I blame soccer for that.

For just as we prepare to root for the Irish Olympians at the London games, the hype is reaching a crescendo for the European Football Championships. Notwithstanding that the Irish team taking part includes (controversially for some) players from throughout the island, it travels to Poland under the auspices of the breakaway Football Association of Ireland, one of the two bodies that persisted in fielding teams under the name ‘Ireland’ until the 1950s.

Representing Ireland against Brazil at Landesdowne Road in July 1973 were the Shamrock Rovers XI (from back left) Miah Dennehy, Tommy Criag, Paddy Mulligan, Martin O'Neill, Derek Dougan, Alan Hunter, Liam O'Kane and (front from left) Bryan Hamilton, Pat Jennings, Tommy Carroll, Johnny Giles, Don Givens, Terry Conroy and Mick Martin.

Fab Four – Don Givens. Johnny Giles,
Martin O'Neill and Pat Jennings .

It hardly mattered so much at a time when there was little prospect of playing on the world stage, but then the 1970s came along with the Troubles and possibly the best crop of home-grown soccer talent we ever produced. From this, a team was put together in 1973 by the two serving captains of Northern Ireland and the Republic – Derek Dougan and Johnny Giles. With no official backing from the ‘representative’ bodies, they engineered a match with the mighty Brazil in Dublin and, with no official sanction, they had to field as the Shamrock Rovers XI. That didn’t stop them racking up three goals against the world champions’ four.

Despite the continuous efforts of the great Dougan to unite the Irish soccer teams, the divide continues, bolstered by marginal success for Northern Ireland in 1982 and for the Republic on occasions since then. It has become firmly institutionalised with many professional reporters persisting in the belief that rugby’s adherence to an all-Ireland selection is the exception, rather than the rule. Indeed, soccer is the exception.

So as the FAI side heads off for the European finals with a team of varied pedigree, the Irish Football Association and its supporters resort to irony and self-derision. Their favourite chant in recent years is the refrain, ‘We’re not Brazil, we’re Norn Iron’.

As if we need to be reminded.

So as credit union accounts are raided for the road to Poznan, I’ll be looking forward to the Olympics and lamenting that the last outing for the Ireland soccer team was in July 1973 – a glorious sporting occasion ‘if only for a few hours’.

On the road to god knows where

The border, hard to spot on the ground, is clearly visible from space, as satellite photos show.

Spare a thought during this fine spell of early summer promise for the poor tourist circling forever on an M1 roundabout at Faughart. Or the other perhaps languishing and lost in the wilds of north Leitrim’s glens, both wandering and wondering how to get to this place called Belfast that their Satellite Navigation systems insist does not even exist.

It is surely a wonder of the modern world that our fickle frontier, unseen by the human eye, is so readily visible to electronic systems, including Google Earth. I have long marvelled that the border appears as a vivid white or yellow line on Google's satellite photos, surely rivalling the Great Wall of China as a man-made structure that is clearly visible from space.  

Even SatNav guide Hugo Duncan gets lost.

Back on planet Earth, meanwhile, we simply follow the roads across the Border with an occasional nod to the change from kilometres per hour to MPH. 

Yet many strangers on our shores do not even realise we are divided between political jurisdictions with their own jealously guarded geographies. They often have to rely on SatNav systems ranging from the dulcet British tones of Tom-Tom to our unique variations with ‘celebrity’ voiceovers featuring among others, Hugo 'the Wee Man from Strabane' Duncan.

Arlene Foster – not for turning.

These tourists are bemused at best by our presumption that if they managed to get here, then they should know how to get about. So we leave them to their devices on our labyrinth of highways and byways and expect them to pick up on our nuances of political positioning along the way.

A senior American travel advisor brought this to the notice of the Stormont Executive’s Tourism Minister Arlene Foster this month at a conference organised by the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB).

The maid from Magheraveely – about one Irish mile from the Border as the tourist crow flies – wasn’t for turning. She insisted there would be no relinquishing on the ‘unique identity of Northern Ireland’ in the stakes to become 'a global holiday destination' this year.

The problem, as outlined by Roger Brooks, president of Destination Development International, is that we do not appreciate how visitors perceive our island. Add to this our failure to even agree on naming terminology for north and south – or even east and west and all places in between – only adds to the confusion.

A few years ago, there was widespread outrage when a young Canadian visitor was told at the Belfast bus ticket office that she could not board for Derry because no such place existed. The ticket-seller was making a political point, it seems, about our legendary Maiden City and took the consequences, although the problem persists. Our failure to tackle our multiple identity disorder has merely exacerbated the problem and now, it seems, Belfast has disappeared too.

Just don't key in 'Belfast' and 'Ireland'.

Roger Brooks, whose Seattle-based company advises countries on how to maximise their tourism potential, told the NITB conference that a funny thing happened to him on his way to the theatre.

He was setting off from Dublin to drive to Belfast using his rented car’s SatNav system: ‘I had to type in the city so I typed in Belfast and then I put in the address of the Merchant Hotel and then do you know what it said? It said there is no Belfast in Ireland.’

The story gets even better, or worse, depending on your vantage: ‘So then I went, let me type in Belfast, United Kingdom, and it said there is no Belfast in the United Kingdom, but we found one in Ohio. So I had to type in Northern Ireland and then it came up.

‘If I put in Ireland, it doesn’t find you,’ Roger Brooks told the conference and the Tourism Minister.

Giant's Causeway goes missing.

So in an age of Google holiday planning, the Seattle advisor advised, this probably means that even prime destinations north of the border do not figure under a search for the keyword ‘Ireland’. The Internet itinerary manages to gobble up the Giant’s Causeway, the Mourne Mountains and more and wash them away with Lough Neagh and the Erne, not to mention entire towns and cities.

He advised tourism operators in the north to buy keywords, including ‘Ireland’ so they get a look in.

‘You have to do that because we see Ireland as this great island and we don’t see it as countries,’ Roger Brooks said, ‘so we have a hard time finding your cities using search engines.’

One would expect that should practical advice would be widely noticed and acted upon. Yet the Belfast NewsLetter carried the only report I could find and it even sought a reaction from Minister Foster on what she had heard from Seattle's SatNav explorer. 

She could see only one road ahead for her jurisdiction, the NI2012 marketing programme of Tourism Ireland, the joint promotion body set up after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

This, she said, ‘offers a unique opportunity to change perceptions and confidently put Northern Ireland on the global tourism map – and the signs are already encouraging.’

The Creighton corner in Clones.

I am reminded, however, of an anecdote from my native town of Clones – about two Irish miles from Arlene Foster's Magheraveely as the tourist crow flies. A local ‘character’ was loitering about the Creighton corner at the foot of Fermanagh Street when a large car pulled up from the Newtownbutler Road. The driver rolled down the window and called out, ‘Could you tell me how to get on the road to Dublin?’ The local guide was dismissive: ‘I wouldn’t bother my arse if I were you,’ says he. ‘Sure if you’ve got yourself lost in Clones, you’ll not have a hope down in Dublin!’ 

Where murder and mayhem lurk…

Hands up, you're in the South now

As we drove back across the Border at Lenamore, my friend seemed to exhale a sigh of relief. The once-forbidding outer reaches of the Steelstown and Galliagh suburbs of Derry city were a welcoming haven now, he said.

He was joking, of course, but with more than a hint of ironic truth

‘I’ve told friends in the South that I’m getting too nervous to visit them now,’ he said, 'because all I seem to read about is violence and murder.

‘At least when that was happening up here, we sort of saw the reason for it. We could even avoid it and live our lives in relative safety. Down there, it just seems senseless and random and it’s as bad as ever it was up here.'

I decided to keep a tally. Today (12 March), it includes the following:

• A decomposing body – thought to be that of a young man who was murdered last summer – unearthed from a bog in north Kerry;

• A member of a military bomb disposal squad injured while making safe an improvised explosive device (IED) fixed to the underside of a car in Cork;

• A warning by a local politician that the proliferation of knives has led to a wave of seemingly random attacks in Dundalk.

The body from the bog was a chilling reminder of the continuing search for the ‘disappeared’ victims of the Troubles. Combined with the under-car bomb, it harked back to the legacy of a 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland, an era we are still working to put behind us forever.

Gardaí gather at another crime scene

But on my trawl for news of violent crime south of the Border, I could have gone back for the past month and compiled daily incidents of violent crime, a recurring catalogue that matches some of the worst of the Troubles.

It would include the shooting of four men, two of them fatally, near a GAA clubhouse in Kildare; a drive-by shooting in suburban Dublin when stray bullets narrowly missed a group of innocent teenage girls; the discovery of two bodies, both with fatal gunshots, in separate cars in rural Roscommon; and the corpses of two men, both shot, in a burnt-out car dumped in isolated Ravensdale Forest just south of the Border.

It is a chilling reminder of former times, yet such wanton violence seems to have become almost an accepted aspect of life south of the Border. When it was happening up north, there was natural alarm that it could spiral out of control and even infect the south in its mindless mayhem.

Back then, people from Dublin and points south visibly quaked at the prospect of crossing the Border. Truth to be told, some still do.

Yet the fact is that the recorded level of violent crime in Northern Ireland last year was the lowest since the start of 1969. Let me say that again, the violence has dropped to the level it was before the real onset of the Troubles and the start of the IRA campaigns.

That was back in the relatively innocent days when Dublin and all of Ireland was agog at the grisly case of medical student Shan Mohangi convicted of killing his 16-year-old girlfriend in a botched home abortion. That notorious story began in 1963 and rolled on for years. Today, it would be a mere blip on the screen of public consciousness, kept alive only by the True Crime industry.

Living in the dark Underworld of 'Jerry Lynch'

For it is a relatively new feature of journalism south of the border that Crime Reporters are top of the heap. They churn out a seemingly endless diet of murder and more, salivating over the details, weaving it into the fabric of ‘what readers want’ and conveying it with all the self-serving certitude of their police informants. It’s like an endless reel of the cult movie Intermission, with Colm Meaney’s over-the-top detective character ‘Jerry Lynch’ directing all the action.

Twenty-five years ago, Dublin newsrooms had ‘Security Correspondents’ whose main job was to monitor and report on the spill-over of violence from the North. ‘Indigenous’ violent crime, not connected to the North, was rare and largely played down by the police because it happened in marginalised and impoverished working-class communities.

Yet the onset of the peace process brought a commensurate rise in the level of ‘crime reporting’. Today, Dublin’s coterie of ‘Crime Reporters’ form a new hierarchy in the industry. They combine into a new breed of reporter that specialises in bated breath, in-your-face eyewitness accounts, delivered with all the brashness of Hollywood goodfellas. The violent murder of their role model, Veronica Guerin, hardly brought a pause in their early gallop and they have now become the self-fulfilling prophets of our age.

Today, many of them even double as writers of churned-out popular crime fiction eagerly sought by publishers to supplement the diet of voracious readers and whet their appetite for the next instalment of reality. It is also noteworthy that among the new flush of crime novelists, the talented teacher from Derry Brian McGilloway focuses his fiction across the frontier in Donegal, an otherworldly Underworld of the imagination that is increasingly styled ‘Borderlands’, as if it was one actual place removed from the real Ireland.

Rupert Murdoch

Meanwhile, other crime reporters specialise in cut-and-paste books of their most salacious offerings for a regurgitated feast of sickening stand-out stories. And just in case you missed it all, there are ‘dot.ie’ websites dedicated to listing news of crime.

It is an endless carousel of crime that begets crime and we can’t even blame the evil empire of Rupert Murdoch who has little control over Dublin’s media machine.

So do I propose censoring news of crime?

Certainly not, but I can’t help feeling that the ascendancy of these Underworld overlords in our news industry has been at the expense of real news gathering, of competent hard-slog journalism that would focus on more than the sensationalised symptoms of a sick society.

Let’s disregard the endless repetition of that police lexicon of ‘thugs’ and ‘villains’, blaming them alone for spiralling violent crime.

Focus instead on the overwhelming majority of people in these marginalised communities who know themselves what can and cannot be done to improve their lives and the prospects of their children.

Let’s step back and resist ‘shock and horror’ for what many news editors would deem ‘boring angles’.

Let’s conduct a reasonable debate about the ‘criminalisation’ of drug addiction that feeds the twin maws of criminals and a ‘law and order’ cult.

Who knows, we might even reverse the seeming inevitable slide into crime as normal.

Non-political crime was once largely in the realm of TV drama

It happened up here with a lot more baggage to carry along and it can happen down there if society resists the dark world of ‘law and order’ doomsayers, and reassesses its values from a fixation with crime to a real focus on caring for ‘all the children of the nation’.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably be watching my back when I cross the Border. For as they used to say on Hill Street Blues, back in those halcyon days of the early 1980s when non-political crime was mostly the fare of American TV soap operas, ‘Let’s be careful out there.’

Changes afoot on the Border beat

Entente cordiale on the bridge at Belleek in 1924

They stood guard as Stormont’s sentinels down the decades; sandbagged, draped in barbed wire, strategic garrisons commanding every significant Border crossing.

Up to the end of 1925, they housed garrisons of ‘A Special’ Constabulary, full-time paramilitary reserves of the new Royal Ulster Constabulary who fought gun battles with the new Free State army across the fledgling frontier. In every successive period of unrest, they were bases for platoons of part-time ‘B Specials’ who guarded the line.

During the course of the recent Troubles, they were expanded, fortified with armoured steel walls, festooned with cameras and listening devices and crowned by turrets to survey the locality.

Most have withstood frequent and sustained attacks, some with significant loss of lives. Now they are redundant, surplus to requirement. So they are being decommissioned with barely a murmur of dissent from most of their surrounding communities.

Removing armour from Castlederg PSNI station

The latest list of 34 Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) stations to be shut down is still under review, but it will include most of the remaining frontline border posts and many others at a step-back from the frontier. The PSNI is slashing its complement of police stations to 49 from the 140 inherited from the RUC in 2001. Earlier closures included such iconic Border stations as Roslea in Fermanagh, and Middletown and Forkhill in Armagh.

PSNI stations now ‘under review’ and expected to close include Castlederg, Aughnacloy and Caledon in Tyrone; Kesh, Belleek, Belcoo and Newtownbutler in Fermanagh; as well as Keady, Newtownhamilton and Bessbrook in Armagh. Further back, but within close range of the Border, others under review include Donemana, Newtownstewart, Fivemiletown, Ballygawley and Moy in Tyrone; Irvinestown and Lisnaskea in Fermanagh; Warrenpoint in Down; and in Armagh, the stations at Markethill and Loughgall, the latter the focus of an SAS ambush in which nine armed IRA men were killed when they came prematurely to demolish the part-time barracks.

Similar stories of sustaining and repelling attacks could be cited for most of the PSNI stations now slated for closure by the newly devolved Department of Justice.

However, policing authorities emphasise this will not deplete but improve services, while reducing the operational budget by 14 % with a saving of £135 million. That should help to defray the £14 million already spent on supplying BlackBerry smartphones (equipped with special software) to police officers on the ground.  

According to the PSNI’s Strabane area commander Chief Inspector Andy Lemon, these devices reduce the need for patrolling officers ‘to return to a police station to complete administrative tasks’.

‘This has already increased the amount of patrol time per officer per shift by over 15% – meaning an extra hour per officer, per shift is spent on the street, in the community they serve,’ Inspector Lemon said (Strabane Chronicle, 2 February 2012).

Planned closures of peripheral stations will mean that the entire land frontier of Northern Ireland can be policed from seven current area command bases at Derry (Strand Road), Strabane, Omagh, Enniskillen, Dungannon, Armagh City and Newry.

On the other side of the Border, the history of policing is markedly different.

With partition, members of the new Civic Guards (An Garda Síochána) were deployed to former RIC barracks in towns and villages. Most of these remained in use until the Troubles threatened to spill over in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Antiquated barracks were replaced by ‘bungalow’ posts and scores (eventually thousands) of young gardaí were deployed for ‘Border Duty’ with extra pay. For example, Clones had a sergeant and three guards in the late 1960s; by 1975, it had 44 gardaí under a district inspector.

Since the 2001 ‘Foot and Mouth scare’, garda deployment along the Border has fallen sharply. Once bustling stations are sleepy day-time posts among the 122 stations in the four ‘Northern’ divisions of Donegal, Sligo-Leitrim, Cavan-Monaghan and Louth.

Garda Commissioner Mrtin Callinan

Of those, frontline Border posts include eight in Donegal (Muff, Carrigans, Lifford, Castlefinn, Ballybofey, Pettigo, Ballintra and Ballyshannon), one in Sligo-Leitrim (Kiltyclogher), 12 in Cavan-Monaghan (Blacklion, Ballyconnell, Belturbet, Redhills, Clones, Smithboro, Scotstown, Emyvale, Monaghan, Clontibret, Castleblayney and Carrickmacross), six in Louth (Hackballscross, Dromad, Omeath, Carlingford, Dundalk and Louth village).

Under the Policing Plan 2012 recently issued by Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan, there are plans to close a total of 39 Garda stations, ‘including eight stations which are at present non-operational’. Only three of these however, are Border stations – Kiltyclogher in Leitrim and Smithboro and Clontibret, both in Monaghan.

So against seven frontline PSNI stations in Northern Ireland, 24 garda stations will remain on the ‘southern’ side of the Border by 2015, when both forces are to commence joint training at the new police college in Cookstown, Co. Tyrone.

So better policing for the south? Not really, it seems, with today's report (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0213/breaking46.html)) disclosing that 40% of Garda stations have no Internet connection, meaning officers can’t file reports by email.

A spokesman for the Garda Press Office was unable to tell the Frontier Post how many stations in the Border divisions have no Internet connection.

‘We wouldn’t have that kind of information here,’ he said. ‘We only have a figure for the national situation.’

He seemed as unconcerned as  senior garda officers who say they can manage without the Internet, and the priority should be in reversing plans to cut the patrol car fleet by 385 vehicles across the board where Dublin’s Justice Minister Alan Shatter wrestles with a current quota of 703 Garda stations. Recent speculation suggests that budgetary cutbacks could eventually mean closure of up to 200 garda stations on the insistence of the IMF-European Central Bank. That would reduce stations to a figure of 500 serving a population of 4.5 million (1:9,000), against fewer than 50 stations covering the North’s population of 1.5 million (1:30.000).

On the Northern side, there is a fatalistic sense even among those who would wish to retain Border security on full alert.

Emyvale garda station

Democratic Unionist Lord (Maurice) Morrow of Dungannon seems more concerned about the possible closure of Garda stations, saying this will mean ‘criminals and dissidents will be given a free hand in operating across the Border. While the future of garda stations is undoubtedly a matter for the Irish government, as a border constituent I am very concerned about the effect this will have on border security’ (Tyrone Times, 28 September 2011).

So in a bid to allay Lord Morrow’s fears about Emyvale garda station’s future, the Frontier Post asked the Garda Press Office spokesman if any future review would include an assessment of  Border stations.

‘If you want an official quote about that,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to send us an email’!