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’.

Seeking truth from Border 'blind spot' and a screen of senationalism

Even while police held security primacy elsewhere, the British army controlled south Armagh from Bessbrook Mill HQ

Here at the Frontier Post, we have been following with considerable interest the tribunal investigating the background to the bloody ambush of two senior Northern Ireland police officers on the Border in 1989. Today, in a dramatic turn on the 23^rd anniversary of the IRA assassinations, the hearings in Dublin were adjourned by Judge Peter Smithwick.

No resumption date has been set and it is expected it won’t be until the tribunal receives British intelligence information which Judge Smithwick described in his recent interim report as ‘highly relevant and potentially significant’.

Before adjourning the public hearings, which began on 7 June last, Judge Smithwick said he is now ‘totally dependent’ on that information. This suggests that the British intelligence report can determine between the counter-claims on whether former Garda Detective Sergeant Owen Corrigan provided information needed by the IRA to kill Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan on the afternoon of 20 March 1989.

Chief Superintendent Breen and Superintendent Buchanan

The Smithwick tribunal inquiry is taking place on foot of this allegation raised in the British House of Commons, following ‘disclosures’ by a journalist/author and a preliminary report on collusion on both sides by Canadian Judge Peter Cory. It has also been taken up by a ‘colourful’ former British agent in the IRA.

Even as the plot thickens, however, there has been some light shed on a dark period of our recent past along a Border that seems even more intricate than the rival plots.  Solicitor John McBurney for Chief Superintendent Breen’s family, says a much fuller picture of what ‘was known and seemingly ignored or withheld with regard to this tragedy’ was now emerging and the detail was ‘almost impossible to comprehend’.

But let us consider some of the evidence. Just before today’s adjournment, a retired British major, Witness 79, testified from behind a screen. He commanded British troops in the district on the day the two senior RUC officers were killed outside Jonesborough at 3.40pm as they returned from a meeting in Dundalk garda station. The former c/o says he was not aware of the police travel plans and these would have been strictly on a ‘need to know’ basis.

Witness 79 confirmed there were a number of army patrols operating in south Armagh, where the Army retained prime control long after the police had been pushed into security frontline in other parts of Northern Ireland. As well, there was contstant helicopter surveillance and the watchtowers on Jonesborough and Forkhill Mountains monitoring cross-border traffic. The attack took place in a ‘blind spot’, however, and Witness 79 suggests local people might not have known this.

On that basis he seemed to support the Garda mole theory that it would have required the risky deployment of too many IRA personnel to monitor all the local roads for the RUC officers’ unmarked car. A British army Brigadier had already gauged that this might have involved 70 IRA lookouts.

Toby Harnden wrote Bandit Country

Now I’m not a trained intelligence officer, nor am I even Toby Harnden, fugitive author of Bandit Country (1999), allegedly based on an awful lot of innuendo, tittle-tattle and information acquired in dubious circumstances through a personal relationship. The Garda ‘mole’ is central to Bandit Country, but Harnden – a former Royal Navy officer who has since written a book about Britain’s war in Afghanistan – last month declined to help the Smithwick inquiry.

Yet I’ve also written a book about the locality. The Chosen Fews: Exploding Myths in South Armagh (2000) was based on my experience of reporting on south Armagh since the mid-1970s backed up by diligent research. This involved frequent and repeated journeys in the district while the elaborate network of British army watchtowers was still in place. I often used Edenappa Road and other known blind spots, precisely because they offered a brief respite from constant monitoring.

So it strikes me that the collusion theory in these killings is based on lack of local knowledge and the pre-supposition of an intricate web of alternative routes that would be almost impossible to monitor.

So let’s consider other facts presented at the tribunal.

The IRA was in ‘communications overdrive’ from 11.30am that day, roughly the time Chief Superintendent Buchanan arranged the meeting on an ‘open and unsecured’ phone call to Dundalk garda station. The two RUC officers used Buchanan’s personal red Cavalier car, registration KIB 1204, which he had previously used for every one of 24 previous cross-border rendezvous with gardaí. They stayed in Dundalk for roughly one hour – meeting Garda Superintendent John Nolan – before setting off back to the border.

Based on that information, a single look-out in Dundalk could tell what road the red Cavalier was taking. That is even discounting that the policemen were tailed by a cream-coloured van from which the four gunmen leapt at the bogus British checkpoint at the Border blind-spot on the Edenappa Road.

Edenappa road runs parallel  to former main road (NI) with new Mi motorway between

Yet we now await the British intelligence report which, one presumes, pre-dates the ‘exposure’ of collusion in Toby Harnden’s book, then backed up by another journalist of rather intemperate views on such matters and a British agent who has long exhausted the sell-by date on his franchise.

Of course, this is not to preclude the existence of an IRA mole in Dundalk Garda station, nor does it discount the elaborate preparations of the IRA in south Armagh whose enemies point out was ‘risk averse’ and very deadly. Conspiracies and collusion are always plausible in a dirty war.

Yet what happened in the deadly war along the Border does not need to be dressed up any more. So we can only hope that this hugely expensive tribunal might yet provide a clear picture from behind the screen of sensationalism that always seems to sell better than the bare truth.

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.’