¶ St Patrick’s Day 2010 and I’m pulling a black Lyle and Scott sweater over a yellow Ralph Lauren polo and going to get the train from Dublin to Belfast. The black and yellow were for the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Inst, and my cousin who was playing in the front row against Ballymena Academy. The Ulster Schools’ Cup final on Patrick’s Day had become a bit of an extended family tradition, cousins lining out for Inst and Belfast Royal Academy down the years.
Getting on that train I was leaving Dublin and the official state celebration of our patron saint. I’ve never been a man for St Patrick’s Day, neither its depoliticised image of Irish identity nor its craic. The revisionism and projection about the day doesn’t interest me, the culture war over whether Patrick is to be considered an undocumented migrant or tradcath. I didn’t and don’t need St Patrick’s Day in Dublin. I’m as Irish in Ravenhill.
At the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1995 Marianne Faithfull introduced her performance of Madame George for Van Morrison in the audience. “For the man: hope you like it, dear. I haven’t quite got the words, but nearly.” Those words. I know this song, this version, from childhood car journeys, my father playing Marianne singing it on a compilation tape. It’s from an album released in 1994. I was no age to understand it, I’d not lived, but I did.
Van wrote it in the late 60s, just before the start of the northern conflict, and in a late verse sings, “And you know you gotta go on that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row.” There’s a sadness to that line, that he had to leave, was pulled back. When Marianne sang it at Montreux she was angry, guttural, the band ascending with her, restraining as she mourned in the next line, “Throwing pennies at the bridges down below, in the rain, hail, sleet and snow.” Whatever jingoism there was to throwing those pennies, Elizabeth’s face on them, in the Boyne, as a rebellion it was insignificant.
Inst lost. Leaving Ravenhill I saw a Ballymena man I’d played with who’d just signed for Ulster. He was brilliant, had already played for Ireland underage, till injuries finished his career. To me he’s as Irish as those I’d left behind on O’Connell Street. Plenty either can’t or won’t accept that.
¶ Some time in the mid aughts and a bus is pulling up to a football pitch in Omagh. I’m on it with my school team ahead of a match against a team from Derry. They’d already arrived, congregated outside the dressing rooms, looking up at us as we made our entrance. A teammate down the back of the bus stands up and tries to rouse us. Fucking Prods. This is our land, they took it from us, fucking state of them, in their blazers. Right, OK, fine.
That sort of chat is expected when you’re looking to get men going, even the sectarianism, but: could we get it right? That confusion though is equally expected. It's been encouraged. And it didn’t matter that my teammate thought the boys of St Columb's College in Derry had stolen our land – that he saw them as strangers was enough.
I talked about that day at an event in Maynooth University yesterday. Ireland’s Hidden Border Violence. I was on a panel with Lynsey Black, who spoke about why the border was a site of violence during the conflict, and John Reynolds, who spoke about the racial nature of borders internationally. Two actual academics. I was there because I grew up on the border.
My parents came down for the day from Sligo, the closest station to Ballyshannon, on the train. When they landed Mum asked me, here, what was I going to speak about growing up on the border, “The time I had my meat taken off me by the guards?” To be fair to her we moved to Ballyshannon in 2000 or so. There were no border campaigns. And I did talk about that incident with the guards.
It was during foot and mouth. Our family home is five minutes from Ballyshannon and five minutes from Belleek on the main road. Take the back ones and you cross into Fermanagh quicker. The outbreak in 2001 is our only experience of a hard border, when the guards set up checkpoints on those backroads. They took Mum’s meat from the butcher over the border. Cousins had Easter eggs taken off them.
Partition is absurd. It’s easy to see that absurdity with a guard confiscating your Easter eggs, when you’re still in Donegal, but rather than confront this farce, the liberal tendency is to mysticise the border, to take a day trip to Portrush or Portstewart, see an Orange hall or some baked goods, meet a man called Norman, and reflect, isn’t this mad, sure isn’t this a different country altogether, this isn’t Ireland.
¶ Yesterday in Maynooth during the questions and answers and we’re asked what we think about southern desire for a united Ireland. Ah.
I need to stop myself when talking about this. I’m happier talking about the north, who wants it and who doesn’t. Southerners who are happy with the way things have been anger me. I talked a bit about a recent survey where 59 percent of the south wanted a united Ireland. The figure was higher for the north, 63 percent.
A few weeks back when the poll came out I got a call from a Newstalk researcher. She was wondering if I’d go on the lunchtime show. This wasn’t to be a proper interview or discussion – I wasn’t Eoghan McNeill, co-founder of The Ditch, for whatever that means, but just our next caller Eoghan. I said why not.
The segment was predictable, to me at least: a few southerners brought on to say they didn’t want to see the state united, that there was too much work to do, that it was too complicated. One said, sure, don’t people in the north have England to look after them.
The presenter asked me if I'm in favour of a united Ireland and why. I told her I am. I paraphrased something Catherine Connolly said during the presidential election campaign. “When I go over the border,” she said on a trip to Leitrim, “I always feel like we have cut off our limb.” The presenter asked me who would look after the roads in a united Ireland.
Yeah I suppose you’re right, the roads, sure pull the tourniquet tight.
