Strabane. This is in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, just across the border from County Donegal. Notice that the sign refers to "Londonderry" rather than "Derry" as it would be on road signs in the Republic.
Below was an interesting gathering of statues that reminded me of nothing so much as a bunch of Terminator endoskeletons, frolicking joyously. I suppose that's uncharitable, but there it is.
We drove along deeper into Tyrone. At a place a little south of Ballygawley, there was a roadblock. I was going to take a shot of it but Dave quietly advised me to get the camera out of sight. As it turned out, the cops weren't looking for bombs or weapons, but were doing insurance certificate spot checks. Larry told us that it was a cross-border effort to make sure every car on the island displayed a valid insurance certificate. Any car of either registration, stopped north or south, will now be impounded if it doesn't have its certificate displayed. Larry's did, so off we went.
As the morning passed, we happened to pull into an Esso gas station just north of a place called Aughnachy. It was here I had what I would consider to be my premier "Zen moment" of the trip. The station had a large general store of the SuperValu chain attached to it, and we wandered into it to refresh ourselves. Machines issued us coffee and cookies while other people milled around us. It was really the only time in my trip I mingled among the people of Northern Ireland (though in truth we were, at the time, only about half a mile from the border). I was a Canadian, used to dollars, who had adapted to euros, and here I was in a store that was selling its goods in pounds and pence.
I remember we stood outside in the gloomy overcast, drinking our coffee, nibbling our cookies, watching the local people come and go in the mid-spring air to buy the little things they needed, pick up the gardening things on offer outside... we stood there, almost in the way, living in the moment. And, once again, I failed to take a single photo of what would, in retrospect, become impressed on my mind as one of my singular moments on the trip. I can't say why I feel that way, but I do. It's one of those places, one of those moments, where a little bit of my soul resides for some reason and will never quite leave. And I don't have a single frame to remember it by.
The shot below is quite a bit further into Tyrone, about an hour and a half later than the previous photo (by which time we'd already passed through Omagh, within a stone's throw of the site of the infamous bombing of 1998 — sadly, without my fully realizing it). It's in the vicinity of Tynan, where the road takes a sudden and dramatic 90 degree turn as it meets Tynan Abbey. As we drove by, Larry informed us that it had been the home of a British peer (Sir Norman Stronge), who was murdered there (in 1981) by the IRA, with his residence burnt to the ground in the attack. History, even recent history, is thick on the ground in this place in a way it simply isn't in Canada.
The closer we got to Armagh, the more Larry reminisced about his brother, Donal, who had been a priest in south Armagh. Larry hinted rather broadly, without ever actually coming out and saying it, that his brother had had certain ties to Republican causes, and had the polite but focused interest of the local RUC. I noticed that whenever Larry spoke of his brother, the speed the SUV was travelling would slow noticeably, as though he were unable to prevent himself from slipping just a little into a wistful reverie about his brother, who was clearly a man he loved dearly and held in high regard.
Arriving in south Armagh, Larry took the occasion to visit his brother's resting place and show us his former parish in a village called Skerries.
We entered the church where Father Donal had once preached. As we did, I noticed a collection plate, and I paused, pulled out my wallet, and deposited a Canadian $5 bill in it. Utterly useless to the congregation, I know. But I left it more as a calling card than as a monetary contribution. I once saw a €5 bill in a contribution box at Fort York in Toronto, and imagined it would be a real kick to the curators to discover it and have proof-positive that someone from Europe had happened by. I hoped the same small pleasure would accrue from my act to the people who handled the collection at the church.
While we were there, we were joined by a woman, one of the laypeople looking after the chuch, who remembered Father Donal well. Larry made it clear that he had issues with the shabby way the Church had handled his brother's funeral, effectively leaving the responsibilities for it (especially financial) on Larry's shoulders. The woman seemed to be aware of these facts and agreed with Larry. She remembered Father Donal fondly and expressed the impression that things were not really as good with the parish since his passing, which I thought was a kindness.
We left Armagh and crossed back into the Republic, in the form of Country Monaghan. As you can see, SuperValus aren't confined to Northern Ireland... here's one selling goods in euros. The "price match" they're talking about here is against those denominated in pounds ("sterling") across the border. At the time I was there, the euro was rapidly closing in on parity with the pound, and since the prices in pounds were lower than those in euros, people from the south of Ireland were streaming to the north for bargains, and it was playing havoc with the merchants in the Republic, and hence, tax revenues — to the point that the finance minister, Brian Linehan, who had once shooed folks complaining of the price differences off to Northern Ireland to shop if they didn't like it, turned around and accused them of being "unpatriotic" when they took him up on it... no sympathy here for this turkey and his open-mouth-insert-foot policy.
We headed south from there, heading back towards Dublin. On the way, we listened to a radio news special about the boarding schools abuse scandal in Ireland. To my utter amazement, the woman interviewed was a childhood emigrant from Ireland, living in, of all places, Toronto. It was a strange thing hearing my own accent on Irish radio. The woman spoke of members of her family who had, as young boys, been victims of the abuse, and how it had adversely affected their lives. One cousin had eventually moved to Toronto himself... she hadn't even been aware of it until she had happened to bump into him while he was working in Eaton's (at the time the largest nationwide department store in Canada; defunct since 1999). The content of the news report notwithstanding, it was a weird thing to have all these extremely familiar references tossed around while I was sitting in a car in rural Ireland, so far from home.
In Slane, County Meath, we crossed an ancient one-lane road bridge over the River Boyne. As we headed down to it, Dave remarked, not altogether to my great joy, that the bridge is infamous for high-speed fatalities. It has largely, but not entirely, been superseded by the nearby M1 bridge, seen in earlier postings on this blog.
In a place called Skerrymount on Dublin Road, we stopped in mid-afternoon at a restaurant called Brambles. Larry knew it to be an inexpensive place with good food; a soup-and-sandwich kind of joint. We lingered there for a while and then got back onto the road into Dublin. We arrived just before the onset of rush hour. Larry dropped us off in a strangely empty part of Ballymun in the throes of redevelopment, within a ten minute walk of Ard na Meala, and we said our good-byes. I found the place hauntingly beautiful and somehow, it reminded me of places I'd seen when I was very young. Dave and I took a brisk walk back to Ard na Meala, and home... home, for me, such as I knew it in Ireland.
Larry, eternal gratitude. Thank you for sharing your Ulster with me and Dave, and your unceasing kindness and generosity to a plastic paddy seeing the place for the first time.
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