One does not require vast reserves of empathy to understand why many of my fellow border county people are so offended by Alan Duke’s claim that we have “violence in our blood”.
Personally, though, it didn’t bother me. I might erect it as a sign outside the front gate, to ward off burglars: Caution – beware of border county person.
The remarks on the RTÉ documentary series Quinn Country sparked a furious reaction from TDs from the area, with the comments branded as “insulting and offensive” and “extraordinarily ignorant and stupid”.
Mr Dukes responded to the TDs’ criticism on Thursday saying there was a lot of “political posturing”.
He continued to argued that the region has “a particular history of violence” while conceding that his remarks were “not well-phrased” and saying he was not suggesting all people in the area were violent.
I did not watch RTE’s documentary series about Cavan’s answer to John D. Rockefeller, mainly because it was on RTE, but partly because the whole thing is so deathly boring: Local bigshot strikes it rich, then makes a complete balls of it. Tale as old as time. But I do understand why people are so fascinated by it, especially given the violence of recent years.
There is, I think, a distinct and unique border county culture, and it has been relatively unexplored in literature and documentary. One of the most insightful things said to me about the conflict in Northern Ireland, growing up close to the border with South Armagh, was this assessment of the South Armagh Brigade of the IRA uttered by a local TD, in private: “Those lads don’t object to British Rule, so much as they object to Rule, full stop”.
Indeed, a very popular song in the border counties for years, still relatively unknown I think outside that region, is “The Transit Van”. It is an homage to one of the great traditions of the border counties, in the years when the border was a real, tangible, meaningful thing: Smuggling.
Border county people, at least in my childhood, lived in the shadow of the border – and far from the blight on Ireland that some claimed it to be, were more than aware of its advantages. My own Grandmother, a staunch Fianna Fáil woman who never crossed the law in her life, was an expert on the relative cost of almost every household product on each side of the border. If you didn’t like the prices in one jurisdiction, there was always another, just a few miles away.
Harmless, and indeed, from one perspective, competition at work. But I would argue that the presence of the border over the years also encouraged the formation and development of a culture of healthy scepticism of authority. Years of evading Irish – or British – excise duties on fuel, or cigarettes, or anything else for cheaper alternatives evolved, I would argue, in more recent years to a healthy fuel smuggling industry, which has been documented extensively elsewhere. There’s also a “wild west” element to the border: At one stage, the region had more police chases than anywhere else on the island, for reasons that simply wouldn’t provoke a chase elsewhere. Why? Because lads with no insurance knew too well that if they could just make it across the border, then the Gardai could not follow, or the PSNI in turn.
The border, in other words, is integral to the culture of the border counties. It’s why they have their name: The border provided opportunity, even as many fought night and day to be rid of it.
This is where Dukes gets it wrong, though, I think: Because while the border counties have their fair share, and perhaps more than their fair share, of criminality and lawlessness, it’s of a kind different to that you get elsewhere: You don’t really get drug dealing, or burglary, or much person-on-person violence. The border county crook is always pulling a fast one, not on his neighbours, but on the state. That’s what smuggling is, for example.
It’s not that violence is in our blood. It’s that the good stroke is in our blood. And so, speaking of course purely theoretically, there might be widespread sympathy in the region for a fellow seen to be fighting the fellas up in Dublin who were out to get him. Even if, again, purely theoretically, that person were to be a crook himself. Seeking to avoid the law, when it hurts you, might even provoke a degree of admiration.
Think again about that phrase I mentioned above: They didn’t object to British Rule, but to rule itself.
Anyway, even were Dukes right, and we all descended from a long line of slavering savages, I’d still be proud to hail from the border counties. That attitude – self reliance – is one of the reasons that Monaghan is one of the great entrepreneurial counties in Ireland, with a thriving series of small and large businesses. There’s a culture of doing it for yourself, and of not expecting a hand out. There’s a sense that Government isn’t really on your side, and that community is more important. At times, that can mean that the local crook gets more sympathy than the outsider authorities.
But honestly, I wouldn’t change that for the world.