With one mighty boundary, our hero is free…

The chief acknowledges his subjects at the coss-Border rally in Ballyconnell.

The exhortation that all ‘Border people’ should come out in support of bankrupt billionaire Seán Quinn and his family is just as troubling as the troupe of widely known GAA stalwarts who lined up to pay homage to the ‘Mighty Quinn’ at Sunday’s rally in Ballyconnell, Co. Cavan.

Their projection of an alternative constituency of rural solidarity based on shared values of 'home and hearth', almost disguises the incredibly slick public relations campaign now underway.

That the campaign is centred on the periphery of both jurisdictions – while one of the main players is using its convenient escape route to avoid jail for ‘contempt of court’  – is almost sheer genius.

Yet there is nothing spontaneous or innocent about the scale and potential of this PR campaign.

Some of the people, all of the time.

Seán Quinn fastidiously avoided his ‘enemy’ until everything was in place. His carefully chosen first foray into  the media campaign was with the local Northern Sound radio and the local papers in Fermanagh and Cavan. Next his ‘fugitive’ nephew was featured at a couple of local football matches – in the company of his former GAA president dad – and then came the rally which appears to be the first of a snowball sequence.

So even after all the highly troubling and detailed exposure by BBC’s Jim Fitzpatrick of the Quinns’ sophisticated criminal manipulation of assets through dubious channels in Russia; clear and proven breaches of specific court orders; and unequivocal findings by respected judges that this was blatant contempt of the law to cheat Irish taxpayers on an unprecedented scale, the Empire has struck back.  

The bandwagon struck up on Sunday and the ‘Border people’ and all those who share their honest, down-to-earth family values are expected to clamber aboard.

Sure, isn't he one of our own!

Suddenly a high-roller casino capitalist – who wagered his entire ‘empire’ (and all its subjects) in a golden Gordon Gekko moment of quintessential greed – is pleading the poor mouth.

Suddenly the man who failed to achieve bankruptcy on his own terms in Belfast High Court is now the victim of bankruptcy, hounded by the Irish courts, the ‘Dublin media’ and, most of all, Anglo-Irish Bank.

Suddenly the family which has siphoned off hundreds of millions worth of assets in breach of court orders, is facing ‘debtors’ prison’ or ‘walking the roads’ after summary eviction.

Where will it end? The novel notion that the true Irish values of honesty, decency and family solidarity maintain a lonely residence on the border between Fermanagh and Cavan is a powerful incentive for those who refuse to acknowledge the facts.

They line up to hail their chief, backed by an array of  GAA leaders who, quite frankly, should be ashamed of the message they are conveying.

Meanwhile, the notion that there is even such a constituency as the ‘Border people’ is news to us at the Frontier Post, where we maintain a vigil on a vast array of communities and districts which did not benefit from the Quinn Group, even in the ‘good times’.

One thing for sure if this campaign succeeds though is that we’ll all be picking up the tab while the Quinns laugh all the way to Belize.

Lost for names in time and place

‘I never saw a richer country, or, to speak my mind, a finer people; the worst of them is the bitter and envenomed dislike which they have to each other. Their factions have been so long envenomed, and they have such narrow ground to do their battle in, that they are like people fighting with daggers in a hogshead.’ – Sir Walter Scott, 1825

Tourist board gets it ass-about-face on the locaton of the Clogher Valley Show

 Ireland, it has been noted, has far too much history and simply not enough geography. Yet what ‘narrow ground’ we inhabit, we envelop in multiple names that confound and confuse visitors, while we inhabitants misname, rename, relocate and forget. 

So long before this age of dwindling assets, we had trouble keeping track of our real estate. And much of it stems from simple carelessness.

Take, for example, the case this week involving the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB), which hardly has a limitless domain to promote by any stretch of the imagination. It placed an ad in the Belfast newspaper, The Irish News, proclaiming, among other events, the attractions of the Clogher Valley Show scheduled for August in the village of Augher. 
In the process, it moved the venue from County Tyrone to County Fermanagh, a not infrequent mistake for Belfast-based bodies when it comes to that proud locality. Fivemiletown on the western fringe of the Valley, and also officially in Tyrone, is invariably assigned to Fermanagh, although the Tyrone-Fermanagh county line does actually run through the button roundabout at the junction of Main Street and Clabby Road.

Wendy Austin

Wendy Austin, host of Talkback on BBC Radio Ulster, took up the NITB’s Clogher Valley faux pas. While wagging the finger at the NITB, she then admonished a couple of Fermanagh people for not knowing where the village of Plumbridge was. Sure didn’t they go through it on their way to Belfast? Wendy was obviously unaware that going through Plumbridge – in the very heart of the Sperrin Mountains of north Tyrone – would entail a detour of more than 100-km from the Fermanagh to Belfast A4 route. That of course would take them perilously near the city of Derry/Londonderry and even closer to the village of Dunamanagh/Donemana.

Let's shake on Derry/Londonderry

 Yet place-names remain at the very core of our identity on an island where the smallest unit of officially named geography is the townland, a space ranging from a couple of hectares to broad expanses of moorland.

We have long sparred across and inside our two jurisdictions of multiple names. Dublin governments and their subjects have been affronted down the years by the use of ‘Éire’ to designate their state in English, even if it is the proper title in the first official language. 
In a similar vein, those who have even shrugged off the Republic of Ireland designation and now style their 26 counties as ‘Ireland’ in all official communications, as well as in the name of their soccer team, regard the use of the ‘Free State’ by northern nationalists as a knuckle-dragging insult.

Rockall – another disputed territory.

In their enthusiasm for a truncated Ireland, it often seems as if they have managed to create an extra 420 kilometres of coastline and floated the six other counties of Ireland off to somewhere near Rockall, another piece of real estate that has caused bother in the past.

Yet it is hardly better on the northern side of the boundary line, where great passion can be invoked by what people call the place. Unionists once proclaimed their jurisdiction as Ulster, persisting in the delusion that they had honoured the Solemn League and Covenant of 1912 by simply obliterating the counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan. More recently, they have reverted to the official designation of Northern Ireland. The use of the alternative ‘North of Ireland’ is now pounced upon as a pejorative insult used disparagingly by nationalists and republicans who were previously denounced for using 'the Six Counties' in all references. Yet for many decades, the ‘North of Ireland’ was used as frequently as ‘Northern Ireland’ by unionist spokesmen, although both names fell far behind ‘Ulster’.

Supporting 'Our Wee Country' aka 'Norn Iron'

(Indeed, common international usage in place-names would suggest that the occasionally heard Americanism ‘North Ireland’ is more appropriate for a defined separate jurisdiction, as opposed to an internal region with less defined boundaries, as in North Korea, South Africa, North Dakota and southern California etc.)

So while Republic of Ireland soccer fans proclaim their allegiance to ‘Ireland’, their fellow football enthusiasts supporting the team of the original Irish Football Association get over this legalism by embracing the diminutive virtues of ‘Our Wee Country’ and chant the reminder that they are ‘not Brazil’ but 'Norn Iron'. Thankfully, fans of all other sports in international competition do not experience this problem.

But our confusion over what to call places is not confined to our own ‘wee island’. While many Irish people bristle and fume at the use of the accepted geographic descriptor ‘British Isles’, they have taken to increasing use of ‘the UK’ to describe the biggest neighbouring island in our ‘north-west Atlantic archipelago’ – the island that we once called ‘Britain’ or even named by its constituent parts of England, Scotland and Wales, before Maggie Thatcher undertook to put the 'Great' back into it.

The UK acronym stands of course for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, yet that meaning is only conveyed publicly in statements – mostly from unionists – wishing parity of esteem with ‘the rest of the UK’. On this island, southern business commentators and others will often refer to situations applying in ‘the UK and Northern Ireland’ as if they are separate places.

The UK designation grows more precarious in the 21^st century, of course, given the Scottish propensity for scrapping the original union forged in 1707 and into which our island was drawn almost a century later, with revision after another century to accommodate the creeping formalities of Irish partition.

Yet our name-calling persists in defying politics, geography, law and even history. The Frontier Post has dealt in a previous blog with those who extend the longevity of partition back into the 19^th century. One prime example of this nonsense was from the historian Ruth Dudley-Edwards.

Barbary pirates raided Baltimore

She is not alone we found this week. On Sunday, the usually excellent evening slot on RTÉ Radio 1, The History Show, featured a fascinating segment on the ‘Sack of Baltimore’ on the Cork coast in 1631 by pirates from the Barbary Coast of Africa. The History Show host Myles Dungan observed that such raids for slaves were not confined to Ireland. They also occurred at that time (1600s), he told us, on the southern coast of ‘the UK’!

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’!