Taking the long cut to Canada

It was a cryptic joke that only a Canadian could fully appreciate:

Q. How do you make the world’s second biggest country disappear?

A. Take a flight to anywhere else and then open a newspaper.

The point (for my non-Canadian readers) is that even with a land mass second only to Russia – and its strong ranking in the G8 club of leading economies – Canada is so overshadowed by its neighbour to the south that it barely impinges on the consciousness of the world beyond its borders.

For most Americans, Canada is merely the source of severe winter weather. For English people, it is a colonial theme park where the Queen goes to romp with Mounties and grizzlies. For most others, it is a paler shade of America with a lot more reserve. For the Irish, it crops up occasionally as a surprise destination for emigrants who, presumably, couldn’t get into the USA and didn’t fancy the long trip to Australia.

I know different, but then I lived in Canada for more than a decade; have been a naturalised Canadian citizen for almost two decades; and my son and daughter-in-law, along with many friends, live there.

So it is a source of constant annoyance that Irish people who are outraged when their small country is treated merely as an outpost of the larger neighbour, are so dismissive in their attitude to Canada.

Even in terms of outward perspective (on that diaspora of opportunities), this cannot be explained as merely a traditional preoccupation with Britain and America. If so, how does one explain the near obsession with Australia, which has half the population of Canada? Australia, of course, is the destination of choice for backpack ‘emigrants’ on short-term work visas. Yet even when I went there in the mid-1980s, Canada was the much more selective destination for emigrants with occupational track records seeking lifetime opportunities.

This was no ‘visa lottery’ whimsy; no take-a-chance on staying beyond the expired visitor visa; no ‘sowing wild oats’ jaunt to the far side of the world until the slump recedes. For the overwhelming majority of those who emigrate to Canada, this is the result of a rational selection of a new home by highly skilled, educated and experienced Irish people. They are going there in thousands, usually with young families in tow.

Gone to Canada and forgotten in Ireland.

Yet it isn’t just a one-way traffic either. Canada has long been the second biggest source of foreign direct inward investment in the Irish economy and it has been a major source of assistance under the Ireland Fund and other schemes that helped prime the so-called Celtic Tiger.

Which brings me to the small issue that prompted these observations. I use Aer Lingus as air carrier of choice, especially from its Belfast hubs. So I get frequent emails informing me of special offers and soliciting my business. I got one of these Aer Lingus emails today, offering me the ‘best deals’ to fly from Dublin to ‘over 70 destinations across the USA and Canada’ from as little as £205.

Wow, £205, to ‘over 70 destinations’ with my favourite airline, I thought, that’s worth checking. It wasn’t because Aer Lingus could only fly me to my choice of Boston, Chicago, New York or Orlando and then hand me on to another airline that would fly me to Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver or wherever I might choose. Not only does Aer Lingus not fly to anywhere in Canada, it clearly does not even consider Canada a country.

Aer Lingus flies anywhere in Canada as long as it's in Chicago.

Oh, it will say that it has strategic 'flight partners', but that’s hardly the same thing as taking me where I might want to go on the unsolicited promise it made me. Instead it would be dropping me into some American airport where, no doubt, I would be harassed again by the Gestapo officers of US Customs and Border Protection (see my recent blog at http://darachmac.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/ugly-face-of-america-on-border-patrol.html?spref=fb).

So what of the £205 fare deal? Well Aer Lingus has offered to take me on a flight path over Canada and the Great Lakes to O’Hare airport in Chicago where I can then get a United Airlines flight back to Toronto. That will take a combined 14 hours and 41 minutes – more than the flight time to Australia! Even with a tailwind on the return, by the same route, it will take 16 hours and 32 minutes. In that exhausting schedule, the £205 has suddenly become a fare of €1,619.27.

It reminds me of the joke about the Canadian tourist in Ireland who pulled up his rental car to ask directions from a local man and was told, ‘Well now, if you want to get there I certainly wouldn’t start from here!’

Ugly face of America on Border patrol

 I ran up against the obstinate paranoia of a world superpower on two separate occasions over the Easter holidays. Both times, I was amazed by the ugly bullying of smug American bureaucracy in the United States Department of Homeland Security.

The first encounter happened at the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit on 28 March. I was crossing from the Canadian side, having landed at Toronto airport after flying from Belfast via London. I was going to a conference at the University of Michigan, having been invited to deliver a paper the following day (Good Friday) on Northern Ireland 15 years after the Good Friday Agreement.

Shut up and sit down.

For the brief visit to Ann Arbor, Michigan, I was accompanied by my son, Ross, and daughter-in-law Serah, both naturalised Canadian citizens living in Hamilton, Ont. I also have Canadian citizenship since 1994 when I lived in Ontario. Yet because I now live back home, I travel on my Irish passport.

I handed over this and when asked for a US visa, I produced one I was issued in the mid-1980s, allowing ‘multiple’ entries to the United States and bearing a stamped ‘Indefinite’ for its time limit. 

I had not needed any visa while living in Canda when I made frequent crossings of the Border without incident. The officer remarked that my old visa was no long valid, having been issued almost before he was born. I would have to go ‘inside’. So watched over by armed guards, we pulled over, got out of the car and filed into the Border station.

A curt female officer of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) standing behind a podium handed me a card form and pen and instructed me to fill it in. I did so. I handed over the card to a male officer who had taken over the podium. I was told to sit down. Several people who came in after me were dealt with speedily, including some travelling on UK passports.

Ambassador bridge too far between Canada and United States

I waited, patiently at first. I looked for direction but failed to make eye contact with any of the officers who clearly were ignoring me. Finally, my name was called out brusquely, ‘MacDonald’. I went over to a stern male officer at the part of the L-shaped counter behind where we were sitting. He asked me why I was entering the United States. I told him about the conference. I was sent back to sit down. I was called up again, asked something else, told to sit down.

Ross and Serah were called up by the officer. I rose to accompany them. The young officer barked, ‘Sit down: I want to talk to the Canadian passport-holders.’ I did so, taken aback by the hostility. I could overhear his contemptuous tone as he asked Ross and Serah how did they ‘know him?’ 

And so it continued for about an hour, called up for curt, accusatory questions, including several about my financial position, the money I had on me and my creditworthiness, then sent back to the ‘naughty corner’. All the while, I got the feeling that this CBP officer was in constant communication with somebody elsewhere who was calling the shots. At one point I was called up and had my fingerprints taken and my eyes scanned.

Soulstice 

Finally, with a Visa debit card payment of $6, I was issued a visa that would allow me enter and remain in the USA until ‘June 24, 2013’. Since it was 28 March and I only planned to be there until 30 March, I wondered but did not ask, if I would get a refund. I also felt it wise not to ask why I had been subjected to this treatment when I had a perfectly valid reason for entry. Instead, feeling like some ‘wetback’ caught wading across the Rio Grande, I slunk out of the Border checkpoint and showed up late for the conference in Ann Arbor, missing the initial registration and part of the keynote address by Professor Chantal Mouffrey of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in London.

My subsequent experience of Michigan was wonderful, the university, the city, the inn we stayed at in Ann Arbor and especially the lounge bar performance of a Motown style soul band called ‘Soulstice’. On the way back we visited Detroit, a city rising from the ashes. Everyone we met there was the very essence of friendly welcome and showed a refreshing deferential pride in their journey from US riches to ruin and slowly back to reinvention of a modern post-industrial city.

Toronto skyline – back in Canada for enjoyable Easter.

Back in Canada, without any incident at the Border, I thoroughly enjoyed Easter with Ross and Serah and visits to old friends over the following days. Then on Thursday afternoon, 4 April, I turned up at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport to check in from my flights back home. Having come from Belfast City airport via London, I was booked (through the University of Ulster) to return to Belfast International via Newark, New Jersey. I presented my passport at check-in. The officer on duty, who turned out to be another agent of US Customs and Border Protection, told me I would not be allowed into the United States because I had no visa. My $6 visa from Detroit (stamped as valid up to June 24) had obviously expired because I was told it was no longer sufficient for ‘entry’ to the United States this time.

I explained that I did not wish to ‘enter’ the United States and would only be making a flight connection at Newark airport en route to Belfast. When this drew a contemptuous scolding from the young woman about my need to comply with US regulations, I observed that I was being ‘penalised’ for using an American airline . She almost lost it at that, saying that US Customs and Border Protection does not penalise anyone and I should just shut up and follow the rules without comment. I shut up and was told I would have to apply for a new online visa approval. Then I would have to get back into one of the most achingly slow queues I have ever encountered in my life.

So with Serah’s help and iPhone, I filled in the online application form for the second time in a week, answering the same questions and queries about communicable diseases, previous convictions and political leanings, paid $16 this time, and was ‘approved’ for entry.

'Penalised' for choosing American airline for flight home.

I got back into the check-in line, which comprised only two others now. Both were almost as frustrated by the slow pace and the line of unstaffed check-in points. We waited without movement. The young Canadian woman in front was vocal in her criticism; the man behind me less agitated, but he hadn’t invested as much time so far. Meanwhile, as we stood and stared, and were pointedly ignored by the CBP officers chatting to each other on duty, those travelling on some preferential scheme were called up and processed immediately.

Finally, my turn came. I presented myself to the same officious young woman as before. She keyed in my details and seemed almost surprised I had been approved. After a stamp and a corrected scrawl, I was told I could ‘remain in the United States until 25 June’ an extra day beyond the visa I had been issued at the Ambassador Bridge a week earlier. I was then shunted through – with my suitcase still in tow – to join a separate line. Here I had my fingerprints taken and eyes scanned once more, went through the usual airport security rigmarole and made it to the flight gate without time for the coffee and duty-free browsing I had factored into my schedule.

By the time I got on board, I was in no mood for the moaning Joe in the adjoining seat who turned out to be from some Wall Street bank. He was leafing through USA Today, making insulting remarks about Ireland and the EU, along with the fiscal management of every other economy on Earth. It was too much. When he accused China and India of stealing American jobs though protectionism and cheating on subsidies, I let him have an earful. I told him about the American economic bullying I had witnessed and especially the US manipulation of the NAFTA trade deal which ‘stole’ jobs from Canada and Mexico. US capitalists wanted globalisation, I remarked, and like his Wall Street masters they had no loyalty beyond themselves, so the American jobs he lamented losing would not be coming back. He shut up for the remainder of the flight.

I barely touched the ground at Newark airport.

In the end, I barely touched the ground in Newark, landing at 7.50pm and taking off again for Belfast at 9.15pm, although I did manage to get that espresso coffee and a much-needed beer at the boarding gate. I did not have to go through passport control, where I would probably have been shaken down for another few bucks as an unwelcome interloper on American soil.

So I only bounced through America on my unwanted and unneeded second visa. It remains valid for another eleven weeks or so. At least that’s what it says in the scrawl inside the passport stamp, but I’ll not be putting that to the test. 

Haunted by my past with Twink

While others quake at the prospect of Twink Unzipped, the autobiography of colourful Dublin entertainer Adele King, I’m betting she doesn’t disclose my personal part in her secret past.
But just in case it turns up in one of those extracts in The Irish Sun or even in revised text for the delayed publication of the book some time in the new year, I’ll come clean myself. And so I hereby reveal that I was once the ghost writer for Twink’s ‘Agony Aunt’ column in the Daily News back in the early 1980s.
Yes, it is true that while a giant Twink smiled down on us like a star from Dublin billboards and trundled along the streets of the capital on side-of-the-bus ads as our resident font of wisdom on troubled relationships, I lurked in the shadows writing the actual column.
It was just a minor part of my otherwise important duties at the Daily News, of course, as we struggled to establish Ireland’s first fun-sized daily tabloid in 1982.
The drill was that I would meet Twink for lunch, discuss a range of letters (mostly penned by me to kick-start a suitable flow of correspondence from readers), note her comments and then go off to write up the cheeky column for that week with the assistance of several glasses of good wine for inspiration.
The subjects of the letters, as I recall, were not always the 'run of the mill' troubled personal relationships and needless teenage angst that readers could find elsewhere. We also sneaked in some subjects that we knew would be regarded as quite risqué or even slightly sordid by the social mores of the time.
Our aim was to provide a contemporary spin on the traditional Irish advice column (as provided by veteran columnists of a previous generation such as Angela McNamara of the Sunday Press and Frankie Byrne of RTÉ). After all, we were providing a modern no-holds take on Irish life in the bright and breezy pages of our full-colour tabloid at a time when rival daily newspapers were uniformly grey and conventionally boring. Looking back with the wisdom of age, I suppose we were aiming in our youthful enthusiasm for the Liffyside equivalent of Sex and the City, long before even the Big Apple was ready for it.

Twink as she was then.

At least that was the brief I took along to lunch at one of Dublin's trendier restaurants of that time.
Mind you, Twink spent a lot of our time together talking about her impending marriage to David Agnew (the core subject of much of her impending autobiography, I understand), and I was expected to offer my own advice on that too… but not in writing, I hasten to add.
In any case, no matter what is disclosed in the fall-out from Twink Unzipped when it actually reaches the bookshops, I accept no responsibility for what transpired because we only had a few lunch dates before the column folded (along with the newspaper) – and that was more than 20 years before her marriage came unzipped!
I had long given up my ghost role as an Agony Aunt by then.

Timely thoughts on coming home

The Toronto Star coverage of the story
that broke while I was up in the air.

It was a turning point in my life that began when the Air India flight touched down at London Heathrow. As we began to disembark, I felt none of the usual numbness of overnight trans-Atlantic travel. Having been upgraded (by carefully engineered chance) to Maharaja class, I was well fed, rested and revived. So as I shuffled towards the exit ramp I was alert to the conversations of fellow passengers, whispers that became more urgent as the circles of contact widened. Several faces registered shock. Out of concern and curiosity, I asked what was the matter: ‘Princess Diana has been killed.’

Over the coming hours, days and weeks, that news would consume much of the wider world, but it became just the coincidental backdrop for my life, a pointer that fixes it to a definite date in history. For that was the day I ended more than a decade as an immigrant in Canada and, after a brief stopover in London, became a ‘returned emigrant’ in Ireland.

The story of emigration is still being told.

Much has been written about emigration – most of it misinformed, maudlin or fanciful by those who can’t recognise the difference between a young, single backpacker with a smart phone and a short-term working visa and those who leave (usually by choice) with families, job skills/experience, and the guts to seek opportunities by cutting themselves adrift. Yet while the story of emigration is distorted, it is told. Little has been written about the process of coming home to a place that no longer feels like home for those who have invested a sustained effort in making a new life in their adopted country. In my case, that final return flight began a wrenching experience even if it seemed at first like the start of another holiday.

There was indulgence for my ‘Canadian’ ways, such as  little vocabulary adjustments or pronunciations, my naïve questions about life in Ireland, my constant comparisons between here and there, my confusion and doubts about the step I was taking for myself and my two children who travelled ahead while I tidied up our affairs in Canada. 

So those initial days passed in a haze. I continued to shuffle along as if the fog would lift suddenly and I would be ‘home at last’. Yet it didn’t happen that way in September 1997, no more than it had in January 1987 when I had passed though Immigration Canada in Toronto as a ‘Landed Immigrant’.

A culture shock in a Dublin taxi.

I remember several cultural shocks in those first days of return: A Dublin taxi driver whose racist diatribe prompted me to get out well short of my destination; the smug arrogance of early harbingers of the Celtic Tiger; the fixation on English soccer and popular culture by those who suggested I had compromised my identity; the bizarre bureaucracy of reinserting myself into Ireland. So as the weeks passed, I could feel my frustration grow and the sufferance of others decline in equal measure. There were fewer smiles when I ‘turned Canadian’, made a comparison, or asked a question about what others regarded as the ‘bloody obvious’ and I was challenged, ‘You know rightly why that is; sure aren’t you from here?”

I suppose those bafflements and annoyances indicate my psychological readjustment to a cultural environment that was familiar yet strange enough to befuddle. My body had been transported back across the Atlantic, but my mind was still in transit and it would take a long time for them to reunite.

Other problems were largely work-related. Having had a successful career in journalism before I left, I presumed I could re-insinuate myself into the fold. In Canada I had built another successful career in journalism, adding valuable experiences and technological skills that were only beginning to take hold in Ireland. Yet I might as well have been outside the door twiddling my thumbs for all the good that did me in the jobs market. I even felt at times that my absence was regarded as a failure and my age (mid-40s) a handicap. So I was not even called for interview when my additional skills were specified, possibly because I had not acquired them in Ireland.

Fifteen years later, I look back on those early days of uncertainty as among the most difficult of my life. I eventually scrambled back. My vocabulary readjusted and I learned not to utter comparisons that receded over time. I built a successful career for the third time in my life, but I’ve never truly settled. Along the way, I’ve written four books, and raised two sons as a single parent until they graduated from university and set off on their own lives overseas.

Canada – my adopted country.

So happy ending? Not really, because I fear the reception would be no different for returned emigrants today. When I returned to Ireland on 1 September 1997, I found a country absorbed to the point of selfish obsession about how it had changed in my absence. There was little acknowledgement that I had changed too, and exponentially in comparison. Unlike the traditional Irish emigrant’s experience of a social support network to complement institutional assistance for newcomers, I found impatience for me to deal with change alone. Unlike Canada and most modern countries built on immigration where help is available to exploit newcomers' skills, there is no agency in Ireland to help returned emigrants adjust.

There seems to be a prevailing Irish notion that emigrants are those who failed and fled and returning home just compounds the failure. I hear similar reactions from every returned emigrant I meet. And it is the ‘small stuff’ that niggles most, issues like an ease of passage for children into the education system, or getting a driver's licence (I had to pass my test for the third time because there was no ‘reciprocal exchange’).

Emigration is not easy, yet so many of us find the practical and emotional support as well as the energy to adjust to ‘living away from home’. Often we are bolstered by the excitement of a ‘honeymoon’ transition and the promise of ‘happy ever after’. Returning home is different for those who manage to find a window in complicated lives. No matter what the circumstances, returning can be like emerging from a failed marriage (and I know what that is like), with an obsessive compulsion to rekindle an old romance, then finding yourself shrugged off or simply not recognised. It is hard to find the energy in such circumstances

So today, fifteen years after I began my new life in old surroundings on the day of the death of Britain’s fairytale princess, I raise a glass to returned emigrants and wish each and every one health, happiness and a hero’s homecoming.

Going for the border bus bonanza

It pays to take the bus from Lifford to Dublin, through Strabane.

Would you go the extra mile for Bus Éireann, Ireland’s national bus service? I did yesterday (Tuesday) when I took the Letterkenny express bus to Dublin.

Not only that, I went the extra mile on the outward and return journey – and I saved myself €5 (or £4) for each of those miles. Surely that must be the best (or worst) mileage rate in the land and it was all courtesy of yet another foible of our fickle frontier.

I got the 9.45am bus from Lifford to Dublin Busaras and returned on the 8.45pm departure. On each leg of the journey, I went through Strabane, just over the bridge from Lifford. From where I live, Strabane would be the more expected point of my departure and arrival.

A small cross-border mile with a big saving.

The reason I set out from Lifford on the Letterkenny-Dublin express service is that I booked my Bus Éireann ticket online. That does not allow the option of boarding in Strabane, presumably because it is ‘across the border’.

In any event, I discovered that my same-day return ticket would cost me €21.85. A bargain, I thought so I enquired about the alternative to online booking. That would have been to go to Strabane bus station, a mile closer to where I live, and purchase from ticket from the booth there. My phone enquiry to the Translink service revealed that I would have to pay £25 for a same-day return to take the same Letterkenny to Dublin bus, boarding just a few minutes after its departure time from Lifford.

On the conversion rate for the day, that worked out at €31.81 – an extra €10 (give or take a few cent) for a journey that was shorter by a combined two miles.

So I walked the extra mile. Well, I drove it, but I could have parked my car in Strabane, walked over to Lifford for the connection, come back on the bus through Strabane (checking my car en route)  and then  disembarked there on my evening return. The online ticket only stipulates a point of boarding and who was going to prevent me getting off a stop earlier.

Next time I'll take a stroll past the 'Tinnies'.

That way, I could have saved my tenner and had a pleasant stroll up Bradley Way, across the grassy knell of the quaintly named Camel’s Hump with the wonderful ‘Tinney’ sculptures in the ‘Let the Dance Begin’ installation. Now that I’ve found my way to Dublin, spent my saved tenner on a hearty pub lunch, and returned again all at the border bonanza rate, I think I’ll just do that.

Rocky road to Rio 2016

Filling in the faces for the next Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

So now that the most wonderful Olympics ever have come to a close with London 2012, and golfer Rory McIlroy has turned in a hugely impressive win at the US PGA, the speculation has begun on where he will hang his cap in the Olympic Village for Rio 2016.

Will the Hollywood, Co. Down wonder opt for Team Ireland or Team GB in four years time?

Some on-air speculation from Dublin today followed the increasingly familiar pattern of born-again cross-border deference to difference.

Golf champ Rory is up for grabs for 2016.

One contributor wondered if the new US PGA champion would go for Team Ireland given that the Golfing Union of Ireland financially supported his early professional golfing career development.

On the other hand, sure hasn’t he the choice by virtue of his birth in Northern Ireland to opt for Team GB? And good luck to him whatever he decides.

Where is the passion? Where is the tribal resentment? Has the very essence of our sporting rivalry been boxed to a standstill in the ring last Saturday night during the bout between John Joe Nevin and Luke Campbell? 

Instead, the airwaves gush with the milk of human kindness after the Friendly Games.

So here at the Frontier Post, we are left alone to shout at the radio that Rory should be ours because the official name for the British team pointedly excludes Northern Ireland. It is our job to keep an eye on such legalities of jurisdictional demarcation. 

In the after-glow of London 2012, even the most truculent and resentful must concede that Northern Ireland  is a de facto constituent of the United Kingdom (UK) of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but it most assuredly is not in the Great Britain of Team GB.

Furthermore, nobody thought to ask if the Team GB brand name would even be appropriate for Rio in 2016. Or would Scottish Premier Alex Salmond’s 2014 referendum on independence put paid to that?

Scotland's gold

If the Scottish Nationalist Party leader has his way, Team Scotland will be entering the fray in 2016 and Andy Murray and his fellow athletes will stand to attention on the winners’ podium for a rendition of ‘Flower of Scotland’.

In that event, could those of Ulster-Scots background (Graeme McDowell) opt for Team Scotland too?

Meanwhile, would a truncated team from the biggest island of the British Isles be renamed Team Britain. And would that then transform Team GB into Team B? Hardly the most auspicious acronymn for the fastest, longest, strongest etc.

I’ll bet none of the branding experts thought of this when they settled for Team GB over Team UK.

Maybe Rory should just declare for Team Ireland now and avoid all this uncertainty and embarassment between here and Rio.

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.