The border station will be no more

Shane Connaughton’s eyes flicker and he brings us back, through the rooms of another world, WRITES PAUL FITZPATRICK. It’s the 1950s, we’re in Kilafana, outside Redhills, and blood is spilled after a drag hunt, a wife hisses at a puce-faced, beaten husband.
Now, we’re in Ballinamore, a couple of decades earlier, and a young Garda from east Galway is staking out a farmyard in the moonlight, waiting on two stick-up men to hide their guns in the hay. Then, an RAF base and a teenage boy ardent on excitement seeing the lights from London, reflected in cloud, and starting to dream.
There are rats in the rivers, smugglers weighed down with bags of sugar, drowning at Clonandra in the Finn, tub-thumping priests defending their housekeeper’s honour from the pulpit, fights at the carnival and the sickening thud from a Garda cell, as a Traveller is punished for stealing a couple of sods of turf, the clatter of hooves as he rides bareback, winking, home to his tent of hungry children.
Some day soon, the door of the old Garda station in Redhills, where Connaughton grew up and which inspired much of his writing, will close for the last time. The stories those walls could tell will be lost. When our guide starts talking, though, it feels real. The ghosts of a border station, with 80 years of history behind it, come to life...

The front garden

We came to Redhills from Kingscourt in 1951. It was a very isolated community. There was no tarred road, no electricity, no running water. In winter we used to have to go out with the axe and break the ice on the rain barrel down the back. Miles from Dublin, miles from Belfast. Miles from everywhere.
My mother was a very gregarious person, she loved company. She loved people coming to visit her, she’d always make friends. They were fourteen years in Kingscourt, so it was a big break for her coming here. And inside in the barracks, it wasn’t that comfortable. It was quite damp and the range wasn’t as good as what she had, it tended to smoke. My father was promoted to sergeant but it was a backward step, really, coming here.
When myself and Brian came with my father to have a look at this place, we brought stuff over the day before, we officially moved in to the back of a lorry. Hen houses and netting wire and corrugated iron sheets, you should have seen it. Like something from the Grapes of Wrath.
And then when we got back, my mother and my sisters were saying; [voice quickens] ‘What’s it like? What’s it like? How many rooms?’ But we had no idea, we were only interested in where the football field was.
I had four brothers, I was the eldest boy and my sisters, Flo and Marie, were older. It was an amazing time.
We played football in the garden. Myself and Gabriel used to play Terry and Brian. There was a lawn here before they stoned it, and every Saturday we’d play for the All-Ireland final. We played for Sam Maguire, we made the Sam Maguire Cup from the silver paper of a cigarette packet one of the guards gave me. And we used to have it sitting on top of that pier there and the winners would hold it up in the air. It meant so much to us.
And Joe Keohane, who was in the Irish Army and was a famous Kerry footballer, he used to lead his men out here on patrol and they used to put down their Bren guns and rifles and we used to play with them as well. I always remember their big brown boots. We were always scared of tackling them, we’d have games with them, they were all from down the south. We thought they were exotic characters, you know. And then they’d show us their guns afterwards.
Because of the IRA campaign from 1956-62, this was a busy station.
That field next door, that was owned by Ms Whyte Venables [the owner of the estate and ‘big house’ behind the wall across the road]. My father would rent it off her every year and he would sow oats for the hens and Tommy Rennicks used to scythe it when the corn was ripe. He used to start at 11am when the corn would be dry and he’d come out and start with his scythe and my mother used to give him dinner. He played for Redhills. He’d been to England and everything. He was an incredible character.
One day in Kilafana [the old Redhills GAA pitch on the Belturbet road] he was so excited he got the ball and threw it through his legs into the goal. He’s dead now, Lord have mercy on him. He was so strong. As he got nearer and nearer the centre of the field he’d say ‘the hare will soon be out, the hare will soon be out’. The hare always stays in the centre, you see. He’d always repeat that.
And the creamery was in full swing, my mother used to send me across for a jug of cream; two and six.
And on the 12th of July the Orangemen would march from the Orange Hall out the Cootehill road to the railway station and get the train, usually to somewhere in Fermanagh. They’d always play the music going past the barracks. One day, they were coming past the station in the evening, they’d get the 6pm train from Clones, and there was a tricolour flying outside the barracks and they were absolutely amazed and quite angry. And I remember them battering their drums and playing their music and old Johnny Roberts came to see my father straight away and my father said ‘the flag is flying at half mast because the commissioner of the Garda Síochána has just died, every station in the country is flying the flag at half mast’.
They’d left the house too early to hear the commissioner had died.

The back garden

There’s a river down the back, it runs out of the wood, and the creamery effluent used to run into it. It was always flooded and swampy in the winter and full of rats. The hen house was just behind the shed. That shed there, half of it was married quarters and the other half was the Garda station.
Our toilet was just in there and just the other side of the wall was the Garda toilet and you could have a conversation with one of the guards. ‘What are you reading,’ they’d say, ‘the Beano or the Dandy!?’
The blackberries are still there from when we were there, too.
One night, my brother got up out of bed and threw his shoe at a corncrake down here. You’d hear the corncrake all night in the summer, the male calling for a female, and now you don’t hear a single one. Brian got up and he ran down and threw it - it was keeping him awake.
It was football, football, football [but], once, we heard about a thing called the Rás Tailteann, a big cycle race. And we thought it was going down by Leggykelly and myself and Brian jumped on our bikes and we rode out and we just saw the tail end of it as it passed. And just a few years later, my brother Brian won the Rás Tailteann in 1969. It was amazing.

The dormitory

When the Troubles happened in 1956, this place was buzzing. There were guards and soldiers from all over the country here every day, it was very exciting. My father joined up in 1923 or 1925 or something like that and he had gone through all that political turmoil. And he suddenly found himself in the middle of it again, with knocks on that window in the night saying ‘you’re wanted, sergeant, on the border’. There’s a dormitory there in that part of the barracks where five or six men slept on kind of army beds. And more men stayed down with the Widow Smith.
You’d have six little iron beds in there. They soon didn’t become strangers. You’d soon find out who they were. One guy had eight honours in his Leaving Cert. I think he came from Dunshaughlin, he was a footballer as well.

There’d be ten or twelve men maybe altogether. Some of them were hurlers from Laois and Offaly and we would play hurling with them. One of them broke that window, I was in goal and he whacked the ball and put it through the window. He was BO for the day and when you are ‘Barrack Orderly’ you are not allowed to leave the barracks whatsoever under pain of... mortal sin, I suppose.
He broke the window and he said to me ‘we’ll nip into Cavan and we’ll get another pane from Mrs Henry’. And we did that, got the glass, he had a Model T Ford car, one of those things you’d see from a 1930s Hollywood film. And he put it down in the footwell and coming round by the One Tree [local landmark on the Ballyhaise-Redhills road], he swung left, the door swung open and the pane of glass fell out and smashed to smithereens. It was unbelievable, we had to go back and get another one, the bloke in the shop didn’t know what was going on. And all the time the barracks was empty.
And we managed to get it in, and nobody noticed we were gone.

There was always something happening. They used to have drag hunts out at Kilafana, across the other side of the road from the football field, on a hill. They’d chase the scent and those days it wasn’t very well policed. Men would go down to the finish line and ‘click-click’ to call their dog. Those beagles sometimes won’t come through for some reason, even if they’re leading by a mile they’ll hang around and not come through.
There was one occasion I remember, it was a beautiful, sunny Sunday. One guy went down and called his dog through and he got the prize. And a huge fight took place. And the man who won the fight was from Drung and he was holding his dog in one hand on a bit of string and he was fighting with the other hand and he was backing up the hill and he wouldn’t let the man he was fighting with get above him on the hill. And his wife said to that man, ‘bad and all as you are, couldn’t you have got up the other side of him’.
There was always something interesting happening.

 

The cell

I remember my father arresting a load of IRA men. One was wearing a Wellington and a boot to confuse anyone who might have been tracking them and one of them turned out to be Terry Lawless, who became a famous Labour councillor in Hackney in London years later.
He got them out at Leggykelly and he brought them in here. He was a pretty intimidating fella, my father, he was very strong. My mother got them tea and sandwiches and he bailed them and told them not to come back to his district again. He could have detained them but, my father, he hated the border. He believed it was a horrible thing to happen to Ireland. He had political sympathy for them and he always said no country is worth the shedding of one drop of blood. Young fellas going across the border against the might of the RUC, the British Army and the B Specials at the time? What chance did they have?

I remember another time we were going to see Drung playing Butlersbridge on a Sunday. My father wanted to go and see the match because there was a teacher from Galway playing for Drung, and he was such a Galway fanatic, my father... And going up that road to Butlersbridge, we came across a tinker’s encampment and they were burning turf. The woman was cooking. And my father said ‘where did you get that turf?’ and she said ‘oh we got it just off that farmer up there’.
So he said ‘Where’s your man?’ He was hiding in the tent and he didn’t come out. So my father waited for him to show his head, he looked very like Barry McGuigan I remember, this guy. He had a little moustache.
And he came out and he said ‘what ails ya?’
And my father said ‘where did you get that turf?’
‘We got it from the farmer.’
‘Oh well come on, we’ll have a word with the farmer.’
The farmer had complained to the barracks about the turf, a few bloody sods of turf had been stolen. But the old man eventually said ‘ok, that’s alright’. So he got on the bike and rode off to the match and I followed after him.
And then, when we were coming back, he arrested the tinker, and brought him in here. The tinker rode his horse in the whole way, and the horse was going like the clappers, no saddle or anything. It was fantastic.
They brought him in and they had him in the barracks, my father and Guard McIlhenny. And I’ll tell you, there was no... It wasn’t easy what was going on in there. I ran around the back, I felt so sorry for the tinker. Because they had broken into McMahon’s lock-up shop, as well. They walked on the butter and everything, I remember him saying.
And I walked round the back and there was a little slit on the black hole [the cell] and I shouted ‘hello Daddy’ and it went absolutely quiet. Because they knew that I was there. And it broke the spell, and they stopped it.
He got bail for ten shillings, I think.
I was waiting for him when he came out through the gate and he winked at me like that [winks]. And he jumped on his horse, there was slight blood on his lip, and he rode out and he rode away.

The kitchen

This was our kitchen. There was a range there and the tilly lamp was on the wall there. There were ten of us in here, eight children and my father and my mother. Can you imagine doing the homework in the evenings, sitting under the tilly lamp?
When we were all around the table, my mother would be sitting by the fire sewing or knitting and my father would be sitting in the armchair reading the Irish Independent. He mustn’t have had a minute’s silence or peace, we’d be all coming in and out.
My sisters got the train every day, changed in Clones and went on to St Louis in Monaghan. We got the train to Clones to school every day as well.
Then when the train finished they brought in the bus. A three month return from Redhills to Clones was 17 shillings, and when the bus came on it was three quid a month. It was incredible, the parents went mad. We started riding bicycles to Clones. I couldn’t do it, I’d arrive in a lather of sweat. So I started mitching, hanging around the Finn Bridge. But my brother Brian and Joey Smith, they could do it and they’d meet up with all the Connons boys on the way. And a whole party of them would ride.
Patrick Kavanagh used to get on the bus, he’d be talking to us. I remember once on the 28th November, 1958, the bus pulled up outside the barracks to let us off and my mother was waiting there and she was very sad-looking. And Patrick Kavanagh was waving out the window and I couldn’t wave back to him. My mother said to me [gravely] ‘Tom has been killed’. Tom Driscoll, a guard from Cavan who used to come out here, had been killed that day in the squad car out at Gannon’s Cross in a traffic accident. He was a young fella, from Limerick, who we’d got to know. Another guard, Mick McCarthy who is still fit and well in Cavan, was in the car with him and was hurt as well, he was a well-known footballer.
Kavanagh was very nice, he used to ask were we studying poetry. The priest in Clones at the time was Fr Morris and he thought that Patrick Kavanagh was a saint. He loved Kavanagh and he loved Shakespeare. He was a lovely man, he’s dead now. But he said to me once, say a few lines. And I said ‘There’s a sea of human faces, of men and ladies fair, to view the All-Ireland final, between Cavan and Kildare.’ I gave him a verse of that and he said ‘that’s not bad but it’s not as good as Lycidus!’ So I gave him a few lines of Lycidus as well, John Milton’s poem.
My sister Flo was the last to see Kavangh alive because she nursed him in the hospital in Dublin.
Supt Murray in Cavan, he used to come out here once a year with a little 8mm film projector and Charlie Chaplin films. He put a sheet up on that wall there, he’d take the tilly lamp down and he’d show Charlie Chaplin films for all the kids, the McIlhennys, the McDonaghs and other friends of ours as well.
I always remember after he’d shown the films, we were amazed. My mother didn’t like Charlie Chaplin but we did. One year he got a sheet of newspaper and he turned it into a cone and he balanced it on his nose, balanced it on his chin and then lit the end and he was going round here like this and my mother was terrified he would set fire to the place. And ever since then I could do the same thing, I often did it in the theatre in England.
The table was over there, against the wall. The old armchair was there, mother’s chair was there. There was a kind of a sink with no attachments there, just a basin. My father had a little mirror there where he’d be shaving with a cut-throat razor.
And the range was there. It wasn’t a bad range but it did smoke sometimes and that would drive my mother mad.
We had hens as well, my mother had hens but a guard’s wife wasn’t allowed to own hens if she sold the eggs in case she made money out of the job. So you had to be very careful. There were eight of us in the family so she needed the eggs anyway.
And then we would go to Mrs Nicholl’s shop at the Finn Bridge. You’d buy a pound of Lough Egish butter there, which was made in Monaghan, and you’d buy it for two and six, and in Joe McMahon’s it was five bob. You had to smuggle it. Many’s the chase happened on bicycles with the customs men looking for a pound of butter. I went down to Mrs Nicholls, she gave me the butter, I gave her the half a crown and I rode the whole way home and back in here and I never tried to hide it, and my father went mad. He said ‘ya bloody idiot, couldn’t you have done what everybody else does, at least cover it up’.
If I had been stopped! A sergeant’s son smuggling butter… It was a common thing. There were men drowned on the Finn at Clonandra smuggling butter and sugar. There’s a song about it.
My parents met in Dublin, I think he was in Dublin Castle at the time, I think he was a detective when they met first of all. And then when De Valera took over in 1932, he appointed all his old men and put other men back in uniform, and my father was sent to Ballyconnell. He was very anti-Dev. My mother was a great Dev supporter and they used to have the argument every Sunday morning in this kitchen, it was great to listen to. They did it almost like a play. They’d be getting ready for Mass. My father was very much an O’Duffy man.
And every evening, we said the rosary in Irish before we went to bed. Every evening of our lives. My father had implacable faith in God. His faith was very simple.
That picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall isn’t ours, we took ours, but it’s similar. All the family’s names were on it. My father believed in God and he believed in the Garda Síochána. Without the Gardaí, all would be chaos.
He retired in 1966 and he used to say ‘I came in when the country was burning and I’m going out when the country is burning’.

The office

We were very rarely in his office. He sent for you if he wanted you to buy stamps or something, that was it.
But once Joe Keohane came, all the jeeps pulled up outside the barracks, we were playing football, and either me or Brian got the ball and kicked it and it came off the side of our foot and smashed the window in the office and the old man got up and looked fierce and chased out after us. And Joe Keohane said [frantic] ‘no Sergeant, easy Sergeant!’ and he caught himself on. They were poring over a map of the area and the glass shattered across the map.
Another day he chased us all round the place and my brother Gabriel jumped into the empty rain barrel, it was summer, and the old fella ran straight past him!
He had a short fuse but he would forget about it quickly.
He wasn’t a good drinker, it would go straight to his head. He used to drink with Jimmy Brady and Seamus Kelly. He could never hold his drink properly. He wasn’t a big drinker at all.
The guards were looked up to in those days, they were much more part of the community than they are now. They are flying round in cars now. The job has changed completely. The country has changed completely.
Sean [Doris, the current garda in the village] and I have often discussed this. The guards did tillage then, they went around to every single farmhouse in the area and they’d mark down how many ducks you had, how many hens, how many pigs, how many sheep, how many horses, dogs... eggs, milk everyting.
They went round to every family, members of the family, age, address, it was called the householders’ book. Every family in Redhills is in that book, even Ms Whyte Venables and her sister. Head of the house, the occupation, the wife was always given as ‘home duties’. Dates of birth. It was a fantastic record, it was kept updated.
My father obeyed orders, he went by the book.
He won the Scott medal for bravery but he never mentioned it. It was over in Leitrim, after the civil war when there were irregulars going round holding up post offices and everything. And they got a tip-off one night about these fellas. They waited in a farm yard, him and a sergeant - he was only a guard at the time - on a moonlit night. And he said as they were waiting this cat came along and started rubbing round his ankles. And next minute these two guys came along and they were armed. They hid the arms in a hay stack and my father jumped up and arrested them. He shouted ‘hands up’ and they stuck their hands up immediately. He wasn’t armed.
That was 1929 or 1930, something like that. He also said that once there was a big fight with tinkers and he rode along with his bicycle and as the bike was flying along he jumped off his bike and across a hedge and down on a tinker on the other side. He was a very fit bloke.
Fr Treanor was another character. He used to be in here every morning sitting there. It was a nightmare. Some priests used to do that, they’d befriend a family and come in.
One day Fr Treanor was visiting somebody and parked the car outside Seamus Kelly’s in the middle of the road and my father came along, he said ‘what do you think you’re doing leaving your car like that?’
He said ‘don’t you talk to me like that Sergeant’. He said, ‘If that car isn’t moved, I’m going to book you!’
But Fr Treanor was an incredible character.
There was a row at the carnival one night, some drunks fighting, and the next Sunday at Mass, I remember this distinctly, he got up and he said, ‘If there’s any more trouble at the carnival, I’ve got a sword in my house and I will stick 16 inches of shining steel in the person’s gut who started that row!’
And another night, he had quite an attractive house-keeper, and at a dance in Killoughter Hall Owenie McGuinness, he was a cattle dealer, said something joking to her and he stood up at Mass and said, ‘Anybody who dares address my Mary in vulgar terms will have to deal with me, and I will cancel all dances!’

The gate

In 1958, I was 16 and we left Redhills and moved to Duleek in Co Meath. It was a shock, I suppose, but it wasn’t as bad as moving from Kingscourt. When we got to the barracks in Duleek it was all locked up and I had to climb up a drainpipe and get in an upstairs window, and my father was very pleased with me, I remember.
And then I left Duleek on the last day in February, 1960, it was a leap year. And it was a whole other world. I was 18.
I went to join the RAF as a pilot and I ended up with all these guys from Eton and Harrow public schools. They had all belonged to the air corps in their schools, the most expensive, exclusive schools in England, and they didn’t know what to make of me at all. And one guy, I’ll always remember it, he came in raging into the billet one day shouting ‘I demand to see the commanding the officer’. And the idea of demanding that struck me, any young guy the same age as me, to have the chutzpah to do that.
I said ‘What’s wrong?’
‘My Pater will go mad, my Pater will go mad!’ I thought he was talking about his uncle Peter or something but it was the Latin word for his father.
I said ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘They’ve said they’re turning me down because I’m colour blind’.
And this guy’s father was an admiral in the navy. My God, he got to see the commanding officer and we were all waiting for him to come back and when he came back we said, ‘What happened?’
And he said [disgusted] ‘I wouldn’t even be allowed to drive a London transport bus if I couldn’t tell red from green never mind one of our jet aircrafts.’ And he didn’t get in.
So I teamed up with a guy from Yorkshire who’d been to a grammar school, he was the nearest thing there to Clones, to St Tiernach’s. I was walking round the barracks with him one night, he was a big tall guy, he must have been about three inches taller than me, and he was wearing sort of a school uniform, grey flannel trousers, brown brogues and a jacket with brass buttons.
And I said ‘What’s that big glow in the sky there?’
He looked up and said ‘Oh, that’s London.’
‘I said wow. Tomorrow, I’m going to be in London.’

A lifetime later and the wheel has come full circle. When he left the RAF base, Connaughton wound up staying in Leytonstone with his friends, the McIlhennys, whose father was a guard based in Redhills. Eddie McIlhenny and his brother were in one bed, their buddy in the other.

“I was a very lively young fella and I was looking for something exciting. And then I discovered acting when I went to London and once that happened, I never looked back,” he recalls.
Half a century on and Eddie is now a wealthy businessman, Shane a successful playwright and author. A few months back, when the Whyte-Venables estate came on the market, Eddie snapped it up, bringing it all back home.
Across the old wall from Eddie’s new estate stands the station, still as a grave. A man named Conneely was the last sergeant there before another Garda from the west, Tom Heneghan, came in the late 1960s. The building was renovated in 1983 but the current incumbent, Garda Doris, has lived in a different house for a long number of years.
Time moves on and the old station is now unmanned, with Garda Doris based primarily in Cavan. Some day in the near future, the call will come and the key will be turned for the last time.
The cold travelling man in his tent, the carelessly parked priest, the insurgent who became a Labour politician, the smugglers and the cock-fighters, crooks and drunks, the fresh-faced gardaí and the wizened army men can rest easy, wherever they are.
The border station will be no more.