Hard Border

Darach MacDonald

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781848406759
• eBook ISBN: 9781848406766
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In his travelogue of the abandoned 50-mile route along the Ulster Canal, Darach MacDonald presents a close-up narrative history of Ireland. On his journey through five of Ulster's nine counties, he looks at the confounding realities and identities brought to the boil by history, geography, politics and faith. He traces the region's pivotal role in the story of Ireland; the facts and anomalies of an arbitrary partition, the impact on local communities, especially among minorities marooned on the 'wrong side', as well as uplifting efforts to forge new links and aid the recovery from trauma.Through travelogues, journals, tales and poetry, he examines how the border and its communities have been portrayed through the decades. Above all, these are the stories of tightly knit communities straddling an historically contested line while struggling for survival and recognition in its liminal shadows.

1. Border Hopscotch

Castle Saunderson to Clones – 14 km

The contrast in architectural styles could hardly be more striking. One is a low modern building of decorative brick and grey cladding that squats at the far end of a vast car park; the other is a stout Scottish baronial castle being slowly consumed from within and without by vegetation. The first is the new home for Scouting Ireland, and has its fleur-de-lis logo emblazoned on the gable; the second is the former home of the father of Ulster unionism, forever facing north to the Promised Land. They share the Castle Saunderson estate, straddling the ages, the traditions and the border between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. This is the starting point for a voyage along the Ulster Canal. If current plans for restoration come to fruition, it will be the first port of call for pleasure craft on the Ulster Canal, the final link of an inland navigation system connecting Limerick, Waterford and Dublin to Coleraine and Belfast. Until that happens, the only means of traversing much of the canal’s route is on foot.

I set off from the car park along a tree-lined path and soon come upon the cluster of castle buildings that still preside defiantly over the River Finn below. Essentially a large two-storey dwelling, the main house has decorative battlements, corbelled turrets, inlaid coats-of-arms and other features of a bygone age. In the townland of Portagh, County Cavan, it sits on the site of a former castle of the O’Reilly clan of Breffni. Precisely when the Saundersons took up residence is a matter of conjecture. According to a family history,¹ when a plastered-over stone was uncovered it revealed a coat of arms dated 1573. That belied the myth of family origin that had been nurtured for generations, confirming the family was originally named Sanderson and from Scotland, rather than being related to the much grander Saundersons of Saxby, Lincolnshire. The ‘u’ was added to the name in the mid-eighteenth century in an unsuccessful bid for the discontinued Anglo-Irish title, Viscount of Castleton. Then the discovery of a headstone at Desertcreat churchyard right beside the consecration site of the O’Neills at Tullyhogue in County Tyrone provided a possible ancestor in ‘Alexander Sandirson, born in Scotland, a soldier in Belgium, a leader of horse and foot in Poland; in Ireland, a justice of the peace and three times high sheriff of the county’ who died in December 1633. The headstone bore the same coat of arms as the stone discovered at Castle Saunderson, which also featured at the home of the Sandersons of Cloverhill, just a few miles away in County Cavan. Whatever their origins, according to the family history, the Sandersons/Saundersons once commanded an estate that stretched for over 20 miles ‘in a straight line’ and bounded the equally impressive Upper Lough Erne estates of the Butlers of Lanesborough House and the Crichtons of Crom Castle, both in County Fermanagh.

The family proved staunch defenders of the Protestant crown in south Ulster. So when Richard Talbot, the first earl of Tyrconnell set about raising troops to support the Jacobite cause, Colonel Robert Sanderson assembled his Protestant neighbours and led them in an invasion of Cavan courthouse during the quarter sessions of 1688.

‘By whose authority do ye act?’ Sanderson demanded.

‘By that of his Majesty King James,’ the chairman replied.

‘We acknowledge no such authority,’ Sanderson declared, as he cleared the courthouse.

For this, he was proscribed and a price of £200 put on his head. Having failed to escape to England, he returned to his castle, assembled his Protestant neighbours and prepared for siege when Tyrconnell moved his forces north in 1689, laying siege to Derry and Enniskillen. Sanderson found his route to Enniskillen blocked by the Jacobites led by Lord Mountcashel (Justin MacCarthy), so he marched his men to Coleraine, where the Protestant ‘army of the north-east’ was mustering. On his departure, a Jacobite detachment led by Piers Butler (Lord Galmoy) destroyed his castle, drove off his livestock and burned every house and barn on the estate. The family history records:

This act of destruction was bitterly avenged, for when the Enniskilleners sallied forth and utterly defeated MacCarthy’s army at Newtownbutler, four thousand fugitives fled from the battle towards Castle Saunderson. A party of Enniskillen horse, making a forced march, got to Wattlebridge ahead of them; and there under the smouldering ruins of the castle, the whole four thousands were driven into the river and perished, not one man escaping.²

There is little evidence now of a bloodbath in the quiet stream separating the Castle Saunderson estate from Derrykerrib Island on the opposite shore, which is in Fermanagh. The island’s approximately 500 acres is separated by narrow channels of the Erne and Finn rivers, but connected by a road bridge just west of Wattlebridge. While the original Ulster Canal commercial navigation eschewed Castle Saunderson for a dedicated channel from Derrykerrib Lough, an inlet of Lough Erne, the €2 million excavation recently begun at this end of the canal will redirect it along a channel of the Finn River past the estate. This work, scheduled to be completed in April 2018, is projected as the first phase in the overall project of reopening the Ulster Canal, according to Irish government minister Heather Humphreys when she visited the construction site at Derrykerrib Island.³

Back in 1841, it was on Derrykerrib Island that the final phase of the navigation was completed, at a cost of £230,000, far in excess of the original budget. The project had been dogged by false economies from the outset, according to Brian Cassell’s pictorial history of the canal.⁴ The original proposal presented by John Killaly in 1815 to the Directors General of Inland Navigation was for 35 miles of canal with twenty-two locks costing £223,000. This was revised to a canal with eighteen locks and a cost of £160,050. When Thomas Telford was asked to review the commercial aspects of the plan, he insisted on a new survey, which increased the number of locks to twenty-six, but these were shoehorned into the budget by reducing their width to 12 feet. That was 18 inches smaller than the narrowest locks on the Lagan and Newry canals, meaning cargo would have to be reloaded onto smaller craft. The canal opened in phases from 1838, but it never attracted the projected traffic. When the final and narrowest lock was in place at Derrykerrib – it was only 11 feet and 8 inches wide – the canal was ready to receive the projected traffic from the Shannon-Erne waterway of the Ballinamore-Ballyconnell canal, which was also being completed in the same year, although it would not be navigable until almost twenty years later because of budgetary problems, disputes with millers and fishermen and even labour shortages.⁵ But by then, truly, the ship was spoilt for a ha’porth of tar.

Perhaps today’s rerouting of the canal so that it passes Castle Saunderson will spur the rediscovery of that place, which should provide an enticing diversion, replete with the history of Ulster. For it was there that Colonel Edward Saunderson entertained house guests who included fellow stalwarts of opposition to home rule in the later decades of the nineteenth century. A former Liberal MP for Cavan, a seat formerly held by his father Colonel Alexander Saunderson, Edward was swept aside in the Parnellite tide of nationalism in the 1880s. However, he was the ‘darling of the Orangemen’, and he captured the North Armagh seat for the Conservatives in the 1885 election, when many of his electoral divisions achieved a 93 per cent turnout of voters.⁶ By the following January, he had organised his fellow Conservatives – who now held sixteen of Ulster’s seats against the nationalists’ seventeen – into a ‘parliamentary Ulster party’ that was ‘volubly supported’ by the prime minister, Lord Salisbury.⁷ On the other side, nationalist MPs John Dillon and Timothy Daniel O’Sullivan dismissed them. The latter, remembered primarily as the songwriter who penned the rousing ballad ‘God Save Ireland’, delivered his put-down lyrically, dubbing the loyalists as ‘mere Saundersonian slap-dash, with about as much substance in it as a soap-bubble’. It was a gross underestimation of the colonel nicknamed the ‘dancing Dervish’, who continued to lead his group of about twenty Ulster unionists until his death in 1906, blocking home rule in the process. He was acknowledged as ‘witty and charming’ but devoid of business sense and averse to reading legislation with which he disagreed publicly, including the 1896 land bill that would result in the forced division of his own estates.⁸ His lasting political legacy, however, was in acting as mentor for the dynamic and precise Edward Carson, who succeeded him as leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance and its Ulster Unionist Council.

Today, Colonel Edward lies in repose in a small and rather nondescript grave in the lee of the chapel, on the estate he inherited from his father in 1857. The headstone epitaph, ‘Love Never Faileth’, is faded, just like the memory of the man, who should be honoured by those who proclaim the tenets of Ulster resistance to home rule that he initiated and championed during the crisis of the 1880s. The family history printed for private circulation in 1936, in which he is remembered as ‘a truly great man’ whose ‘life is indelibly inscribed in the history of Northern Ireland’, includes the observation that he very narrowly missed ‘by ten minutes’ being appointed as chief secretary of Ireland by Lord Salisbury, pipped at the post by Arthur Balfour.

Most engagingly, Colonel Edward also comes across as an entertaining host much beloved by his extended family. Among his party tricks, he would stand sideways to the billiard table and, putting one foot up on the edge, stand up on it ‘without apparent effort’. Another trick was to stand with his back to a door, clasping his hands over the top, and then raise his legs and body quite slowly until he ended up sitting on top of the door. House guests, including comic and romantic songwriter Percy French, loved to stroll in the bog garden created by the colonel’s wife, Helena Demoleyns, daughter of the third Lord Ventry. Nor were his guests spared from the challenge of physical feats. An old friend, Thomas Cosby Burrowes, recalled how male house guests were not allowed to go to their beds by the staircase: ‘They had to shin up the pillars which supported the landing above! Unless they could accomplish this by no means easy feat there was no bed for them that night.’⁹

Colonel Edward’s son Major Somerset Saunderson inherited the estate in 1906 and lived there as a bachelor ‘in peace and quiet’ until 1914, when ‘an outrageous attempt was made … to coerce Ulster into a new scheme of home rule’. The family history records his leading role in ‘preparations for defence’. Somerset married late, and his American wife Marie Countess Larrisch spent lavishly on improvements to the castle until the Anglo-Irish Treaty, when Cavan was ‘severed from Ulster and all that Ulster meant’. In the family’s absence, the castle was raided for arms by IRA Volunteers based in Clones, including many Fermanagh men from the Wattlebridge company. Subsequently, the paramilitary RIC Auxiliaries were garrisoned at the castle. When they left, it was stripped bare of doors, windows, lead from the roof, water pipes and anything else of value. Major Somerset abandoned it to the Free State, and in the process declared poignantly, ‘Now I have no country!’

Castle Saunderson lay abandoned and forgotten for decades. When it was acquired in the early 1980s, I visited it as a reporter for the Sunday Press newspaper and wrote about the refurbishment and plans for its use. Shortly thereafter, it was raided by Gardaí and a large arms dump was discovered. A short time later, it was engulfed in flames once more. The castle was gutted and destroyed for the final time in that conflagration, although the estate chapel remains a serene resting place for the Saundersons and their role in the history of Ulster and Ireland. Long gone are Castle Saunderson’s days of glory, described in 1739 by Rev. Dr William Henry of the Royal Dublin Society and Trinity College:

The situation of this seat is chosen with both spirit and taste; it stands on the top of a hill, which commands all around, and risen high over the south side of the river; at the bottom of the hill are some plantations; and, from the castle to the skirts all around, the hill descends in a verdant, spacious lawn – here and there interspersed with single large forest trees. The boldness of its aspect makes it naturally a stronghold, and gives it an uncommon air of grandeur; it looks majestically over the river to the north, and a great part of Lough Erne to the west.¹⁰

Today, not even the shoreline is negotiable until the canal restoration work is completed, so I am forced into a digression along the road. From the estate chapel, the avenue crosses a small stream and runs through an open gate that forms the border between Cavan and Fermanagh; that is, between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. It is the first of several border crossings on the Ulster Canal route of about 10 kilometres to Clones. Emerging from the historic estate onto the main road almost precisely where it ceases to be the South’s N54 and becomes the North’s A3 is a shock to the senses. The ornate gates are clamped into a cluster of commercial shopfronts that form the forecourt for P&J Fuels, a service station proclaiming ‘LowLowFuels’ on its huge green canopy, and offering a fast pump for kerosene heating oil and another shopfront for ‘Fireworks’. It’s a huckster’s welcome to the lakelands county of Fermanagh, a tacky roadside enclave that jostles for space and attention as heavy traffic whizzes by. For the next mile of my walk along the Ulster Canal route, I will hug the hedge, dodging the side mirrors of vans and lorries on the main road connecting the north-east of the island of Ireland with the west coast and midlands.

The plans for the restoration of the canal and its towpath will not encompass this blot on the landscape, and future trekkers and navigators can look forward to a channel quite removed from the interface of Leggykelly, County Cavan, and Drumboganagh Glebe in Fermanagh. Before leaving, however, it is worth pausing to recall one notable death in the recent conflict, that of the first and most senior police officer from the Republic to be killed in the conflict that raged along the border. Garda Inspector Sam Donegan, a native of Ballintampen, Ballymacormack, County Longford, led a detachment of police and army from Cavan to investigate a suspect device left on the road at this very point on 8 June 1972. ¹¹ The booby-trapped device was actually about 30 yards inside Northern Ireland, but Inspector Donegan crossed the border to examine it. In his book about southern border security in the 1970s, Bombs, Bullets and the Border, Patrick Mulroe noted that although Inspector Donegan’s death caused ‘shock in the locality,’ it subsequently ‘did not receive the same national coverage as other Garda deaths’. ¹² Another account described the media coverage as ‘pitifully low’.¹³ I recall the incident well and the speculation that swirled through the locality in the absence of any arrests or trial coverage. One newspaper incorrectly reported that the blast was detonated by remote control. Unconfirmed reports at the time suggested that the box had the word ‘Bomb’ painted on its side, perhaps a bizarre suggestion that it was a hoax and this allegedly prompted Inspector Donegan to kick it dismissively. The box actually was connected to a gelignite bomb, and the garda and an Irish Army lieutenant were caught in the blast.¹⁴

Inspector Donegan was rushed to Cavan Hospital, where he died from his wounds. He was 61 years of age, married and the father of six children. Both the Official and the Provisional wings of the IRA active at that time denied responsibility, but suspicion fell on the latter. It was a huge funeral, presided over by the Catholic Bishop of Kilmore with nine chief superintendents, fifty-three superintendents and 150 other Gardaí leading the cortege, while six Garda inspectors flanked the tricolor-draped coffin and six sergeants acted as the pall-bearers. There was an army guard of honour and Minister for Justice Des O’Malley, Garda Commissioner Michael Wymes and the chairman of Northern Ireland’s Police Federation were in attendance.

There had been fewer, less exalted mourners in attendance when 19-year-old Thomas Francis McCann had been buried only a few months previously, in February 1972.¹⁵ Although a Dubliner, like many young working-class Irishmen before him, he joined the British...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction: Always on Edge
• 1. Border Hopscotch
• 2. Cheek by Jowl: Clones
• 3. Cloak and Dagger
• 4. At the Summit
• 5. County Town: Monaghan
• 6. Oriel Affairs
• 7. Dark Edges
• 8. A Maimed Capital: Armagh
• 9. O’Neill Country
• 10. Friend or Foe
• 11. The End Is Neagh
• Endnotes
• Sources
• Acknowledgements