It Occurs To Me:  Blaney, Lynch and the seventh county?

As I was driving around the Lifford roundabout recently, I was greeted by an election sign which read: “Welcome to the Forgotten County!”, and I was reminded that within that forgotten county, there’s a big slice within that gets nowhere near the recognition of the Tír Conaill west, north and south of Letterkenny. 

In 1753, a 400-page tome entitled The Ulster Miscellany was published, in which nine poems chronicled the life and times of mostly Presbyterian families in east Donegal. 

As Doctor Frank Ferguson of the University of Ulster observed: “We should feel profoundly excited about the Scotch poems in the miscellany.  These poems constitute the first sustained collection of serious verse in Scots to be written and published in Ireland. They speak very much of the desire of the publisher to record the authentic vernacular literature of the province of Ulster. This collection within a collection, points to the usage of Scots as a spoken and a literary language in the northern-most province of Ireland. In addition, one might suggest that Donegal is the cradle of Ulster-Scots poetry and that it would take nearly a generation for counties Down, Antrim and Derry/Londonderry to catch up. If the identity of the authors may remain hidden, what is very obvious is the calibre of the writers and their usage of Scots to express themselves in a number of moods and poetic genres.”

READ NEXT: This year’s Creeslough View is now on sale

There was a time in certain Ulster households, that the two main books within were the Bible and the poems of Robbie Burns. Yet, before Burns, some Donegal bards were ahead of the poetic posse. What has this to do, if anything, with going to the polls?

Well, bear with me, as it has to do with a wonderful yarn told to me by Colm Clarke in Monreagh. Colm is the man who does the flax cutting and gathering demonstrations in the Monreagh Heritage Centre and is a fund of knowledge and craic. 

In January, the former Northern Ireland prime minister Terence O’Neill invited Taoiseach Sean Lemass to Stormont and ended up with Ian Paisley and supporters throwing snowballs at this car. The following month, O’Neill visited Lemass in Dublin. The Paisleyites were already seething at O’Neill’s attempts at reform and were incandescent about the ‘treacherous’ visits. George Forrest, who was the Unionist MP for Mid Ulster, and a staunch supporter of O’Neill, was dragged off the platform at the 12th of July celebrations in Coagh, County Tyrone, and kicked unconscious by fellow members of the Orange Order. 

In December 1967, Lemass’s successor Jack Lynch travelled to Stormont for his first meeting with O'Neill, and in January 1968, they met again in Dublin.

On 19 January 1968, O’Neill made a speech marking five years in office to members of the Irish Association, calling for “a new endeavour by organisations in Northern Ireland to cross denominational barriers and advance the cause of better community relations”. 

On May 20, 1968, he was pelted with eggs, flour and stones by members of the Woodvale Unionist Association who disapproved of his policies.

In May 1969, a month after he resigned as PM, he gave a most unfortunate interview to the Belfast Telegraph, in which - good intentions aside - his old ascendancy mask slipped and he managed to insult and patronise the entire nationalist population: 

“It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets; they will refuse to have eighteen children. But if a Roman Catholic is jobless, and lives in the most ghastly hovel he will rear eighteen children on National Assistance. If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness they will live like Protestants in spite of the authoritative nature of their Church.” (I would have fired snowballs myself!) 

Anyway, Colm Clarke’s yarn concerns one moment in the Lynch-O’Neill conversations where poor Terence reflected on the 1921 Anglo-irish Treaty and regretted: “It was most unfortunate Donegal was not included in Northern Ireland” to which Jack responded: “We’ll give it to you if you take Blaney!”

Former Labour Party adviser Fergus Finlay remarked after the local elections that he was afraid to open a window in case Simon Harris would pop up! Popping up in Donegal in the past month won’t salvage the Fine Gael seat here, and hard to believe, no Blaney name in the polling booths this time around. 

In 1849, French writer Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”  – the more things change, the more they stay the same...his Donegal equivalent, Phonsie Carr, would agree! 

By the way, if Pearse and Mary Lou end up in power, there will be an unmerciful shake-up of An Garda Síochana…henceforth they will be known as The Shinguards!   

At the launch of the book celebrating 50 years of Glenree Sports Club in the Carrigart Hotel are, along with Frank Galligan,  former athletes Myles Gallagher (club co-founder) John Cronin (president of Athletics Ireland) Pat Cronin and Noel McBride, in whose house the club was formed in 1973             

                                     Condé Nast and Donegal

Condé Nast’s media brands attract more than 72 million consumers in print, 394 million in digital and 454 million across social media platforms, so their reviews have serious clout. Recently, they cast their eye on us and said: “Located in the northwest corner of Ireland, Donegal has long been isolated, in many ways, from the rest of the island.

This has been something of a mixed blessing. On one hand, the region has had little access to the stream of capital that in a generation’s time has made Ireland, whose economy was once nicknamed “the sick man of Europe”, very wealthy. On the other, its isolation has afforded it a measure of protection from the forces of modernity that have eroded Gaelic culture in all the places where it once thrived. 

For a certain kind of traveller, this makes Donegal an ideal place to linger. While it may lack some of the luxuries now common in other parts of Ireland, there may be no place more richly endowed with the island's traditional gifts of culture, nature, and spirit.” 

Some of their observations are a wee bit twee and scant consolation to mica victims etc, but the feature on Mairead and a trad session was spot-on. 

“Ní Mhaonaigh rose from my table and joined the crowd of musicians, gripping her bow higher up on the shaft and generating the trademark speed and intensity of the Donegal fiddle style. Watching her and her friends fill the room with music, their eyes gleaming in the dark, I wondered how long it would be before their world vanished too. Throughout my trip, people had expressed fears about the future of the Donegal Gaeltacht and its culture, pointing to the region's stagnant economy and the disruptions of a hyperconnected age that has disconnected us from our physical surroundings and what came before us.”

East or West, Irish or English, Catholic or Protestant, “Welcome to the Forgotten County.”                            

                                     You’re having a laugh!

John Cleese nails it: “A good sense of humour is the sign of a healthy perspective, which is why people who are uncomfortable around humour are either pompous (inflated) or neurotic (oversensitive). Pompous people mistrust humour because at some level they know their self-importance cannot survive very long in such an atmosphere, so they criticise it as ‘negative’ or ‘subversive’. Neurotics, sensing that humour is always ultimately critical, view it as therefore unkind and destructive, a reductio ad absurdum which leads to political correctness.”                         

                                     After Storm Bert, Storm Donald?

It’s five years since Trump went on a bizarre rant about wind: “I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much…Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing.”

Come January, the Chief Spewer will be breaking wind in the White House. You couldn’t make it up!