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’.

Map-reading errors persist on Border

Geographic confusion continues along the border with news organisations filling in blanks of knowledge on a ‘best guess’ stab at what might be almost right.

Tonight, the Frontier Post antennae went up when we saw a news item on BBC about an explosive device that ‘could have killed’ at a roundabout on the AI Dublin to Belfast road.

The report said that this was at ‘Newry, County Down’. However, the actual location was at the Cloghogue roundabout.

Now those of us who were held up – both delayed and detained – many times in the course of our duties during the recent conflict are familiar with the location of Cloghogue. A huge British Army checkpoint grew up there over the course of those years, eventually surmounted by one of those big observation towers festooned with surveillance equipment for watching and listening.

It was not something you could have missed noticing either even driving by on the AI.

Today, it seems, Cloghogue is just a roundabout, so anonymous in peacetime reporting that it has shifted counties. For if somebody had done their homework before placing it so definitively, they would find out that Cloghogue is in County Armagh.

The confusion is hardly surprising, since everywhere prefaced by the name of Newry is now assumed to be in County Down, although about half of the town/city remains in Armagh where it has always been. Yet that is not the greatest infringement of geographic confusion along the Border.

South Armagh is included in the Newry and Mourne district for administrative purposes and also for modern postal addresses that operate on a postcode numbers rather than actual places on the traditional map which in rural areas was composed of townlands.

So Crossmaglen, served from Newry, is transferred to Down, along with Forkhill, Camlough, Newtownhamilton and other communities. No wonder there were frequent reports of map-reading errors down the years from squaddies who could not hope to rely on places staying in the one spot!

The late Paddy Short, a south Armagh man who never lost his way.

The civil rights activist, guide, publican and wonderful raconteur Paddy Short of Crossmaglen used to marvel about the geographic displacement caused by substituting townland names with postal codes and signs for arbitrary road names. 

One such wonder was in his native townland of Lurgancullenboy, which had been designated as ‘Lurgan Road, Crossmaglen, County Down’ in the official housekeeping. 

Paddy laughed heartily at that, pointing out that Lurgancullenboy was still in County Armagh and anybody taking that road would be going off in the opposite direction of Lurgan which, for those who do not have a good map handy, is in the north of County Armagh and quite near both County Down and County Antrim.

Built in Belfast, County Down. Sunk in Atlantic Ocean.

In fairness, the geographic confusion it’s not just a Border problem. Anywhere north of Drogheda seems to be a grey unknown area for many in the Dublin media, just as Belfast media can barely see beyond Dromore – that is the one in County Down for our Tyrone followers. 

Maybe the ultimate justice in this is that current events in the Titanic Quarter are assumed to be happening in Belfast, County Antrim, while they are actually happening in County Down.

Such careless navigation might even explain how somebody could have missed a big iceberg! Surely if so many can misplace a roundabout, and an entire city or two, what chance is there of pinpointing a big lump of frozen water on a vast and dark Atlantic Ocean?

Back on the Border, but in the north-west this time, Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister was in Newtownstewart last week sounding off to his vast coterie of West Tyrone followers (well, almost a dozen). His clarion cry was that any improvements of the A5 road, which runs from Derry city to the border at Aughnacloy, ‘will create a united Ireland by road’. Mind you, this is after the Dublin government has withdrawn funding from the project, notwithstanding that it would vastly improve access to and from Donegal. Now it’s just Jim Allister ranting about a major road project for the use of people west of the Bann. Somebody must have misplaced his map too.

There are persistent culprits when it comes to this ‘pin in a map’ guesswork. They needn’t think we don’t notice at the Frontier Post.