The New Frontier by James Conor Patterson

Author:James Conor Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Island Books
Published: 2021-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Borderlands of Armagh and Louth are old ones, complex and often contradictory in nature, and identities and allegiance seem constantly turned on their head. Long before 1921 it was a place of violence, of outlawry, of rebellion. For centuries long before Northern Ireland came into being, Dundalk was the last outpost of English might in Ireland; the men on its ramparts clutching their spears and nervously eyeing the Hill of Faughart in hopes that the wild Ulster Irish would not come. Before the Cooley Peninsula hid anti-treaty IRA men, it provided shelter for United Irishmen fleeing the Ballymascanlon Yeomanry. To me it often feels as if these undulating hills allow history to fold in on itself, making it more dense.

I leave the graveyard and for a moment consider continuing my walk, in a loop that would encompass all the intricacy of this Irish Border. Just down the road are the remains of a Norman motte from the twelfth century. A mile further along the same road stands the grey tower of Moyry Castle; erected in 1601 on orders of English commander Mountjoy after Uí Néill troops left Moyry Pass undefended during the Nine Years’ War. Just down the hill from the castle, in a field set back from the road, is the Kilnasaggart Stone, one of the oldest inscribed stones of Ireland. It was set up in the 8th century, decorated with thirteen crosses and bears the inscription, ‘This place, bequeathed by Temoc, son of Ceran Bic, under the patronage of Peter, the Apostle.’ If I looped back to Jonesborough and crossed the Border to the Republic from here, I would after a while pass the spot where RUC Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan where gunned to death with automatic rifles in March 1989, after coming back from a meeting with Gardaí in Dundalk. On the Border itself sits a shed that has one half in the Republic of Ireland, one half in Northern Ireland, and which was used at various times over the last century to smuggle pigs.

I am not from here, and that comes with privilege. As a white male I can walk here more freely than a woman or someone with a different skin colour might. There is also an element of escapism in approaching the tragedies of the Borderlands: I came here at the end of my thirties, neither as refugee nor asylum-seeker, but as someone who decided not to live in my country anymore. I left my Protestant upbringing and all my other childhood traumas safely back in Germany. In Ireland, I never had to face the Catholic Church, never faced unemployment, hopelessness or small town paranoia. I use the landscape to provide me with a framework to engage with the country I left. I still hover between feelings of familiarity and dislocation here, yet it feels as if only at a distance from Germany am I able to form ideas of my native country. And if the Borderlands have taught me one thing, it is that there are no simple stories, there and elsewhere – appearances deceive.

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