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Borderlands – Radio Foyle Broadcast

M. Higgins: Aw well you know all the neighbours, anybody you spoke to
together. There was no such thing as Protestants and Catholics.

P. Harte: If you take a look at the map you’ll see that Lifford and Strabane are
very much in the centre of this area, but because of the changes
that have resulted since the introduction of the border, as I’ve said
both have become very peripheral, and have suffered as a result in
terms of their own development.

M. Kennedy: The Point of Finn would be quite a famous landmark for the local
inhabitants of Strabane and Lifford. It’s the point where the River
Finn, which comes down from the hills of Donegal meets the River
Mourne, which starts way up in the hills above Omagh and flows
down through Newtownstewart and Strabane. And where those two
rivers come together, at the Point of Finn, it then becomes the River
Foyle. The significance of the rivers is that the Mourne, Finn and
Foyle is the demarcation line which signals first of all the lands of
O’Donnell and O’Neill right through the early centuries and then
laterally it marks the border between Northern Ireland and the
Republic of Ireland.

M.L. Kerr: Historian Michael Kennedy standing on the border between


Northern Ireland and the Republic. In this part of the country the
rivers Finn and Foyle act as a physical boundary between North and
South, just as down through history they’ve separated the
boundaries of Tyrone and Donegal. At this point too the twin towns
of Strabane and Lifford, close enough almost to be one, face each
other across the river, and thus across the border. Although the
people of this area feel very close to one another, in a sense, it has
always been borderlands. In the ancient Ulster of nine counties, the
river acted as a demarcation line between the warring clans.

M. Kennedy: They Tyrone side was the land of O’Neill and the famous chieftain
Tourlough Luineach would have been the chieftain of the Strabane
area. Over on the Lifford side it would have been the great
O’Donnell’s and the annals of the four masters record that in 1522
there was a famous raid on the land of the O’Neill. O’Donnell came
across and obviously burned the small encampment or castle (near
Strabane), stole a lot of his cattle as well and left the town in ruins.

M.L. Kerr: Lifford was the stronghold of the powerful O’Donnell clan and even
today traces of their former glory can still be seen.

M. Kennedy: Well we have the courthouse which dates from 1746, and which is
built on the site of the O’Donnell castle. The O’Donnell castle was
one of the most important strongholds in the borderlands between
Donegal and Tyrone. It’s interesting that although the border
created in 1922 became a feature of our lives, there was a border in
times gone by between Donegal and Tyrone, and this (Lifford) was
the land of the O’Donnell’s and the castle in Lifford was the most
important castle for defensive purposes in this area. If you go down
into the cells underneath the courthouse, some of the walls there
are eleven foot thick, so you’re actually standing inside a medieval
castle.

M.L. Kerr: Eddie O’ Kane Lives in Cavanacor House on the outskirts of Lifford.
As well as a family home Cavanacor is also an art gallery and a
heritage centre for the area. Eddie has been involved in many local
initiatives to develop Lifford as a tourist destination, its importance
hinging on its historical role. Eddie’s own house is part of that
history.

E. O’ Kane: On the 20th of April 1689 King James passed through on his way
from Mongavlin Castle to Strabane. After dining under a sycamore
tree in from of the house of John Keys the squire of Cavanacor, he
gave the house his protection, which afterwards saved the house
while those of all the protestant houses around him were burned.
The old oak table at which the unfortunate monarch sat to dinner
and the antiquated china upon which the dinner was served are
preserved as curiosities. I often wondered why the Williamite troops
didn’t exact some punishment on John Keys of Cavanacor, but when
I was reading through other related historic materials related to the
siege, I came across the fact that two of John Keys’ brothers,
Thomas and Frederick Keys, both from Cavanacor, were actually
inside Derry, defending the city against James. So, at the time the
history was very complex, and this gives us some of the flavour of
the times.

M.L. Kerr: 20th century history has not been so lenient towards the town of
Lifford. With its twin community of Strabane across the river, Lifford
began to lose its commercial importance as a focus for economic
activity when partition took place in the early 1920s. All of a
sudden, the twin towns found themselves on a margin of two
separate countries, and if Strabane suffered, Lifford was badly hit.

Speaker 5: It was only with the establishment of the border in the 2910s that
the two communities tended to go into a decline, because Lifford
was the administrative capital of Donegal and still is, but after the
border became an issue it became very peripheral in Donegal. In
many ways it may as well have been on the west coast of Donegal,
because things have tended to become centralised on Letterkenny
and while it’s great to see Letterkenny developing at the rate that it
has developed, it has meant that lots of the smaller towns have
suffered and Lifford in particular has suffered. The industrial
development authority offices used to be sited in Lifford and they
moved to Letterkenny. The County Library was sited in Lifford and it
was moved to Letterkenny. So there’s a chronic of movement away
from the town, and although the County Council is housed in the
County Buildings in Lifford, of all the people who work there,
relatively few of those people actually live there, and people tend to
get on their buses or into their cars in the evening and leave the
town. This means that for the community generally there is a lot of
what could be seen as decline which tends to undermine morale.
There is a need for regeneration and this is true of all the border
towns. I’m familiar with Strabane and Lifford but I’d say with
Strabane and Lifford but I’d say that Beleek and Pettigo, and Newry
and Dundalk have all suffered in similar ways. I’ve talked to people
from those communities from time to time and their experiences
are in many cases similar. So some of the work being done at the
minute by bodies like the International Fund, in terms of their
regeneration programmes are very important, and any assistance
and help that such agencies can give to border towns is very
valuable. If you take a look at the map you’ll see that Lifford and
Strabane are very much in the centre of this area, but because of
the changes that have resulted since the introduction of the border,
as I’ve said both have become very peripheral, and have suffered
as a result in terms of their own development, because they seem
to be at the edge of things, rather than at the centre, and I think
that’s the problem that the border has brought to all of these towns.

M. Higgins: We were one, all one. Everybody knew everybody in Lifford and
everybody knew everybody in Strabane.

M.L. Kerr: Mary Higgins, born in 1898, was in her early 20s when partition took
place. She remembers when there was practically no distinction
between the towns of Lifford and Strabane, before their
communities found themselves living in two separate nations.

M. Higgins: Oh well you knew all the neighbours. You spoke to everybody, you
all played together. There was no such thing as Protestants and
Catholics. I’d love to see the way it was now because, we were
Catholics with a band the same as the protestants.

M.L. Kerr: If the creation of a border for political reasons was a shock to the
Lifford Strabane community, it seemed even more unnatural to
have an economic boundary between two towns, who had always
been close partners in commerce.

M. Higgins: You couldn’t bring anything out of Strabane, and if you did it was
taken off you. At border, there was a customs hut across there
when you come over the bridge, there on the other side of the road.
When the custom man saw you coming, he’d just come in at you,
and if you had anything, say, tea or sugar, anything like that…he
just took it off you. That was that. So you didn’t bring anything
unless you had some place to hide it.

M.L. Kerr: Did you ever smuggle anything across? Did you ever hide anything?

M. Higgins: Oh aye indeed I did! Many is a thing I wouldn’t remember now, but
everybody was hiding, everybody was trying to bring something
over. I remember buying a new hat, and there was a brooch in it
and I put it in there, and I remember the custom man asking me,
‘Where had you that?’ or ‘Where did you get it?’ So he says ‘you’ve
a new hat on you’, and of course the hat was taken off me. Oh you
know, it was an awful thing to happen. It was a stupid thing. Well,
anyway, many is a time we tried to smuggle, especially anything
wearable. Sometimes you got away with it and sometimes you
didn’t.

M.L. Kerr: Even after all these years Mary Higgins is still angry about losing
her new hat. To people who had been used to walking from Lifford
across the bridge into Strabane to buy a few goods or vice versa,
the new customs restrictions seemed petty and infuriating.

J.P. Giblin: I never considered the person who went out and maybe bought a
television set for themselves or a suit of clothes or whatever it was
for furthering themselves personally too wrong. I didn’t consider
them the smuggler really. The smuggler was the one who went out
and got a big load of goods and jumped them in over here for big
profit. The fines of course and the penalties were high for anybody
who was caught but that’s against the times they got away. For the
one time they got caught, nine times they’d get away. So that’s why
the fines were so high at that time.

M.L. Kerr: John Paul Giblin became a customs man or ‘Assistant Preventative
Officer’ as they were then called back in the 1960s. He was posted
to Lifford in 1969 and preferred to concentrate on the big time
smugglers, shifting lorry loads of beef or alcohol instead of local
people bringing in items for their own use. The customs men of the
60s were a lot more relaxed about their job than their vigorous
colleagues of the 1930s. Times were changing.

J.P. Giblin: The border was really opening up, all the approved roads that had
been closed for…previous…were opened up, so people were moving
around freely. Of course that made our job that wee bit more
difficult – the detection and the prevention of smuggling and the
protection of the revenue of this state. In the 60s, all vehicles, all
motor vehicles especially, tractors even – they all had passes,
customs passes. In the case of motor cars a person had to get their
passbook stamped on leaving the Republic of Ireland and on coming
back from Northern Ireland. They had to get it stamped either at
exit or entry, as the case may be, and this could prove difficult at
times because people would run around maybe in the middle of the
night and often the posts were closed and very often they’d come
knocking at our door looking to get this passbook right or if they’re
coming out of the North. So there was sometimes a lot of frustration
and a lot of anger about the whole thing.

M.L. Kerr: Being a customs man could be a lonely job.

J.P. Giblin: Socially we didn’t have much of a life because we had to work when
most other people were having their leisure. The smuggler of course
had all the aces, the had the twenty four hours of the clock. It was
very often we had to maybe get up in the middle of the night. Or
maybe there’d be a load moving or a load on customs. We often
had to leave our tea or dinner because these were prime times or
favourite times for the smugglers to move. The customs officer had
to eat too!

M.L. Kerr: If interrupted sleep were the biggest risks John Giblin had to face…

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J.P. Giblin: Oh the customs itself here was blasted out of it, nearly at the very
beginning of the troubles. There were numerous demonstrations
around the post itself. There was an attempt made at one time even
to burn the place down. We had to beat a hasty retreat out the back
and run for it. It was very dangerous job altogether, in fact there
was two of our chaps one night and they were very lucky they
weren’t shot dead. They were doing a surveillance job not very far
from here and the army were also doing a surveillance job on them.
They were going round on the brink of the river, the brink of the
Finn river there with walkie talkies in their hands and binoculars and
they didn’t look too safe at that stage. Fortunately they got away
with it. These were the kind of things that were happening.

The security forces were doing their surveillances too of course


along the border naturally. One of our chaps was up a tree one
night when he’d been surveilling the border and the security forces
in the North seen him up there so they landed over a helicopter and
took him away into Derry for questioning. He had some explaining
to do, (laughs) with what he was doing up the tree, at that time.

M.L. Kerr: But the life of a customs man wasn’t all danger, doom and gloom…

J.P. Giblin: Of course there was good times and there was fun too. One time
some of boys went in for their tea with a patrol car. They locked up
the patrol car in the garage, in the customs garage, and during the
tea hour some smart smuggler came down and put a second lock
on the garage door with a result that when the boys came back for
their tea they couldn’t get their patrol car out.
P. Harte: My earliest recollections are the building of the old corrugated iron
sheds that housed the custom officers in the 30s. What this
generation have forgotten or maybe weren’t told about is that for
the first ten years it was a political divide between North and South.
It was not an economic divide. It was only when the Economic War
was fought between

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[the Irish and British governments that the economic divide began.]

M.L. Kerr: Paddy Harte was born in Lifford ten years after the partition and
grew up there during the Second World War. Although he was too
young to take account of it at the time, his older relatives were well
aware about what the creation of the border would do to Lifford and
Strabane.

P. Harte: My grandfather James Harte forecast that the very close


relationship between Strabane and Lifford would broaden or widen
as the border became more copper fastened. Lifford and Strabane
of course were twin towns and there was great inter-community
relationships there. My great-grandmother was a Dillon from
Strabane and most families are intermarried and in many ways it’s
the one community. There would have been more movement
between Strabane people and Lifford than there would have been
between Strabane people and Sion Mills or Strabane people and
Donemana. Of course the football teams on a Saturday were
Strabane and Lifford boys, and on a Sunday there were the same
boys playing for Lifford on a Sunday and playing for Strabane on a
Saturday.

The border has changed all that. The Lifford that I grew up in…we weren’t
conscious of the border, except of course if you were smuggling,
then you had to avoid the customs officers. But if you were going to
Strabane to play football or if you going to the dances or the picture
halls, or just going across to Strabane because you’d have nothing
else to do, you didn’t notice that there was a border there. The
customs didn’t bother you unless you looked bulky, so there was
free movement between Strabane and Lifford. Of course the people
from Strabane came our way as well.

M.L. Kerr: As a public representative, Paddy Harte has often had to deal with
cross border issues which greatly affect his constituents. Apart from
the security and community relations aspect, the most important
concern is the economic one.

P. Harte: The one thing that really annoyed me, immensely, was the break
with sterling. At that time there were two bi-elections in Cork and I
along with a number of deputies were campaigning in Cork and we
weren’t really switched on to what was happening in Dublin. When
we got back to Dublin we were hearing a lot about the European
Monetary System and I couldn’t get anyone to tell me precisely
what this European Monetary System was about, and it took me
days to discover or to get a focus on it. And when I got a focus on it
I went to see Gareth Fitzgerald and I told him I was very much
against it. Not for the economics of it, but because if it so happened
that we joined the EMS and by doing that we broke the link with
Sterling we would have two currencies on the island of Ireland.
Sterling would be a foreign currency in the Republic, and Irish
money would be a foreign currency in Northern Ireland, and I
thought it was anathema to my thinking, that Irish money should be
foreign currency in Ireland. I became very emotional about it, and
took a stand against joining the EMS then and I still stand by that. It
showed to me that politicians were blind to the tender relationship
or understanding on how people in the border areas associate with
one another. The break with Sterling, as far as I am concerned, was
a disaster for people, and it was partition, real partition, because
my family, my great grandfather, my grandfather, my father and
myself, we were customers of the Northern Bank in Strabane, and
once we broke with Sterling then everyone in the Republic had to
withdraw their accounts from the banks in Northern Ireland and
open accounts in banks in the republic. That’s partition, that’s
telling people, ‘you can’t do that, that’s a different jurisdiction.’ No
one could see that in Dublin.

When I look around and I wonder why this is happening I notice that there
is a line, an imaginary line between somewhere north of Dublin to
somewhere north of Galway, and deputies living south of that line
are not terribly interested in the very minor details relating to the
border. They’re cushioned against it, or they’re protected against it
or not thinking about it and the majority of deputies are from the
area south of that line, from Dublin and south of it. Not terribly
different in Northern Ireland, you have the MPs in the old Stormont
all coming from within thirty miles of Belfast, and they weren’t
switched on to the cross border dimensions or the problems they
would confront…[eg] people in the village of Cady having business
dealings with the people of Castlefinn, or people on the Donegal
side of the border dealing with business people from Clady, the
same thing happening between Strabane and Lifford , the same
thing happening between Inishowen and Derry. Politicians in Dublin
weren’t switched on to that. You had to be living here, to really
understand what the people wanted and I have made my argument
so many times – a party that preaches economic policies which
interfere with the normal trading of people living on either side of
the border, are not really talking about unity. Whatever else they’re
talking about, they’re not talking about unity, because you can’t
have political unity if you can’t bring about economic unity…

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…some foreign policies make it impossible and difficult and obstruct


people on either side of the border from doing business with each
other.

M.L. Kerr: Paddy Harte, like most people welcomes the lowering of European
trade barriers and the disappearance of the customs men from the
road between Lifford and Strabane. The border however is still very
much in evidence in the shape of a new heavily fortified army
checkpoint, and so it is that the twin towns of Lifford and Strabane
maintain their close ties whilst facing one another across the divide
in borderland.

Speaker 6: In many ways my dream would be that one day the area between
Strabane and Lifford would be built up and would become the one
community. I think that if partition hadn’t of happened, you would
have seen Strabane spreading in the direction of Lifford, that you
would be one community, and of course if the border wasn’t there,
what difference would it make, whether you were from Donegal or
Tyrone? Incidentally I come across various letters addressed to
ancestors, and it was to Lifford/Strabane, Co. Tyrone, Ireland. The
main post office was Strabane in those days, and that was
considered as normal before the setting up of the partition.

Borderland is presented my Marie Louise Kerr, and produced by


Stephen Price.

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