David Dunne
Boundary Condition
How borders are different
On the afternoon of December 19, 1975, my father left his office early, locking the door behind him. Outside, the dim winter light was already fading. He buttoned his coat against the chill rain. Dundalk was busier than usual, as Christmas shoppers browsed twinkling store windows. Across the street, Kay’s Tavern was already filling up with early drinkers.
I don’t know what he was thinking at that moment, but I am quite sure personal safety was not on his mind. That would soon change.
He unlocked his car. Instead of heading home, he took the Dublin Road to pick up Miriam, or Min, the second of my three sisters, and bring her home for the holiday.
By this time, I was living in London, happy to have left behind a boring, stifling existence in a provincial town. But, as I look back on it now, Dundalk was a unique place, one I couldn’t out behind me. In 2022, I went back to understand why.
We were a solid, middle-class Catholic family of five squabbling children—Paul, Barbara, me, Min, and Adrienne—who hated and loved each other with equal ferocity. In the 1970s, Barbara moved to Limerick, in the southwest of Ireland. “When I moved there,” she told me, “I was thrilled to find the real Ireland—you know, with the music, the pubs, and the céilís.”
Tucked beneath the border on the east coast, Dundalk felt different from the rest of Ireland. It was a market town, but, in an agricultural country where the National Ploughing Championships still have the status of a rock concert, its main preoccupation was industry. It had a thriving engineering works and several factories producing shoes and those Irish staples, beer and cigarettes.
Pubs weren’t in short supply, but they tended to be brightly lit and cheaply furnished. Unless you looked very hard for them, you were unlikely to find céilís.
What made Dundalk—The Town, as we called it—different was its location, just south of the border with Northern Ireland. Most of the Republic could receive only the state TV network, RTÉ, which reflected rural, Catholic Irish society back to its citizens. In Dundalk, we watched the world through the lens of the British networks, BBC and ITV: in the 50s and 60s, we saw mods and rockers give way to flower power and Carnaby St.
British influence was strong, but there was a flip side. During the Troubles, Dundalk became a republican hub, where hard men fighting to rid the island of the British took refuge and planned operations north of the border. Certain pubs—Kay’s Tavern was one—were known as haunts of the paramilitaries of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Established in the 1920s as Ireland shook off British imperial rule, the border hived off a piece of the island that would remain part of the United Kingdom and have a permanent Protestant majority. Unlike the straight-line borders of the new world, it meanders along ancient county lines, through farmers’ fields, along roads and streams, and divides at least one village. At one point, it doubles back on itself to form an almost complete loop. It is about 500 km long, and even when it was fortified could be crossed at over 300 places, most of which were not monitored.
For three decades beginning in the late 1960s, the border was a dangerous place. The Troubles, the conflict that engulfed Northern Ireland, was a brutal war involving republicans (who wanted to unite the island), loyalists (who wanted Northern Ireland to remain British), the British Army and police. A peace process brokered by the US culminated in the landmark Belfast Agreement[1] in 1998, which quelled most of the violence.
Border posts were dismantled in the early 2000s, a measure made possible by the fact that both Ireland and the UK were members of the European Union. After the UK voted for Brexit in 2016, the prospect that border posts might be reinstated was so alarming that a fudge, the Northern Ireland Protocol, had to be found to keep the border open. Today, you can still cross freely and forget that the boundary exists.
A lot of attention is given to borders as legal entities, lines that clearly separate jurisdictions. But in practice, the line is never clear. It is better to think of borders as regions where ingenuity, isolation, and identity combine to make them unique—and surprisingly durable.
Borderers most commonly express their ingenuity through smuggling. The particular nature of the Irish border—multiple, uncontrolled crossings and divided properties—has lent itself to some legendary schemes.
When the border was fortified, one scheme typified the brazen ingenuity of the border area. It concerned Tom (Slab) Murphy and his pigs. Murphy, a bulky farmer with a broad, ruddy face beneath a cloth cap, owned a farm straddling the border, which ran along the rear wall of his farmhouse and through several sheds.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the EEC (forerunner of the EU) paid subsidies of up to £9 per pig on southern pigs entering Northern Ireland. Murphy would allegedly take his pigs across the border into the North to collect their subsidies, and return to the Republic by taking them from one end of the barn to the other. From there, he would repeat the process and claim the subsidy again on the same pigs.
You didn’t need to have a farm straddling the border, though. Other farmers took advantage of the hundreds of “unapproved” roads without border posts that crossed the border. But pig-running wasn’t the only scheme. “It’s a lot easier with grain,” said a border farmer I spoke to, with a wink. “There’s no noise.”
Like pigs, grain was subsidized. Farmers loaded trucks with sand and topped this with barley or wheat about two feet deep. They would ship twenty tons of this “grain” across the border and claim the subsidy. “The lorry came back on an unapproved road and just went round again, and you would do this maybe ten or fifteen times,” he said. According a police officer, at least one smuggler nearly got caught because the grain had been so long on top of the sand that it started to sprout.
Still another farmer smuggled booze from Northern Ireland, where alcohol was cheaper, to the Republic. He built a false gate into his slurry tanker, so the tail end, where customs officers would look, contained a stinky brew of manure and water. It was enough to dissuade even the most dedicated customs officer. Behind the false gate, he stacked as many bottles of liquor as he could fit. He sold these up and down the Republic at discounted prices.
The border region is full of smuggling stories that celebrate some ingenious rogue who found a way to hoodwink the authorities. In the 1970s, even I had a scheme of my own, in partnership with my brother Paul, who was working as an accountant in Belfast.
I was an eighteen-year-old university student, my mind less on studying than the usual things eighteen-year-old boys concern themselves with: sex, drugs, and fun. These interests were severely curtailed in the dour Catholic South, where all contraception was banned. However, in Northern Ireland, Paul had access to a precious commodity: condoms.
I might have chafed under the South’s theocratic regime, but I was not without a few resources. At my university, I knew people who could supply the finest, fragrant, Lebanese hashish. Paul, in the conservative world of Belfast accountants, did not frequent such circles.
The deal was done over a few pints in a Dundalk pub. Before long, I was shipping a rolled-up copy of the Sunday Independent to Belfast, at the centre of which was tightly packed a wee brown cube. Condoms moved south by similar means, and, just to make sure everything was correct, Paul sent me a detailed ledger, in his neat accountant’s handwriting.
The ledger was our undoing.
Like any good Irish mammy, our mother had a keen nose for skullduggery, an instinctive suspicion of what her offspring might be up to—a survival skill when you have more children than you can keep track of. Her searching hand found the ledger at the bottom of my sock drawer, where I had crudely stuffed it after a cursory look. Though a practiced smuggler in her own right—of groceries, clothing and the like—she was unimpressed by her sons’ venture into international trade.
Of course, I played to perfection the part of the innocent younger brother, corrupted by my elder sibling. With a stern lecture, my chosen profession as drug kingpin came to an abrupt end.
To be truthful, I was a bit of an amateur in the condom department. After a family planning clinic was set up in Dublin in 1969, one of its founding members was caught smuggling 40,000 condoms into the Republic by Gardaí, Irish police, checking for weapons. He insisted they were all for his personal use. “Ah go ’way,” said the Gardaí, and let him go.
Smuggling is only one kind of border ingenuity. According to anthropologists, the collision of cultures makes them creative places; they are metaphors for all kinds of boundaries separating ethnic and religious groups, communities, and for liminal zones between them.
This gives rise to powerful stories. Among many others, Bruce Chatwin, Stephanie Griest, Nicholas Murray and Pico Iyer wrote about physical and metaphorical borders; borders are a perennial theme in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Thomas King, and Luis Alberto Urrea, and in the poetry of Choman Hardi and Alberto Rios. In Ireland, Eoin McNamee and Eugene McCabe wrote compelling, often disturbing, novels based on events during the Troubles. Colm Tóibín, James Connor Patterson, and Garrett Carr have all been fascinated by the border, a place where anything can happen.
They are also symbolic, and because of this, visual artists have used them as a medium for protest. On the West Bank wall on the Israeli-Palestinian border, there are nine images attributed to Banksy, one of which shows a young girl being levitated over the wall by balloons, another a “hole” in the wall with a view to the other side. On the US-Mexico border, the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo creates conceptual performance art where the border fence ends at the Pacific Ocean between Tijuana and San Diego, and at other locations along the border. And after the Berlin Wall fell, 118 artists from 21 countries began painting it; the former wall is the world’s longest open-air art gallery, at 1.3 km.
Borders are economic, legal, cultural, physical, conceptual, and metaphorical; they are both the result of division and its cause; they defy the powerful and subvert the state they are there to protect; they represent bodily, sexual, and spiritual divides; borderers may be victims of state power, its source, or both. In the very place defined by a clear line, the truth of borders is multifaceted and ambiguous.
As the Troubles intensified from the 1970s on, smuggling took a darker turn. Murphy, the pig smuggler, was a stalwart republican and reportedly an IRA leader. Allegedly, he organized five massive shipments of arms from the Gaddafi regime in Libya. These shipments included AK-47 rifles, heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, surface-to-air missiles, and Semtex, the plastic explosive often used in IRA bombings.
In the 1980s, Murphy was said to have turned his ingenuity to oil smuggling. With oil tanks on both sides on the border, he could move oil in either direction, depending on the prevailing price on each side. Much of the fortune he made was used to finance IRA operations.
But all this was hidden from view, as was Dundalk’s role in the Troubles. Hidden from my view, at least; others were watching very closely.
Borders are almost always isolated places. Most of the world’s capitals lie far from an international border[2], and borderers tend to feel forgotten and misunderstood. Poet Patrick Kavanagh described the border region, far from the cultural influence of the capital, as “a no-man’s land/ Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims”.
To outsiders, borderers may seem disloyal and lawless, but this is a misunderstanding of border communities. Far from the centres of culture and power, their loyalty is to their neighbours, regardless of which side of the border they happen to be on.
In September 2019, long after the Belfast Agreement, fifty-year-old Kevin ,, CEO of Quinn Industrial Holdings, drove into the laneway of his home near Derrylin, on the northern side of the border. A white car was parked in the laneway, and it quickly reversed into his car. He was dragged from his vehicle and bundled into the trunk of a black Audi. Both Lunney’s car and the white car were set on fire. Inside the house, Lunney’s family, not knowing he had been moved to another car, watched in horror.
Lunney was taken to a remote farm across the border in Co. Cavan. He was beaten, slashed on his hands, face and torso with a Stanley knife, and had bleach rubbed into the wounds; he had his leg broken, twice, with a baseball bat; the initials QIH (for Quinn Industrial Holdings) were cut into his chest.
He was dumped at the side of a road. Severely injured and losing blood, he later told the BBC that he thought he “was going to die on the road.” He was found that evening and taken to hospital. Slowly, he recovered from his injuries.
The chattering classes jumped on the incident as an example of the depravity of borderers. In 2022, Alan Dukes, former leader of a major political party, commented in a TV documentary that border people “have violence in their blood.”
“They are living in communities that have a long history of violence of different kinds, and they will more easily turn to it than anybody else will,” he went on. “…it is something that is nearer to the way they think than it would be to somebody in [other parts of Ireland].”
Dukes was roundly condemned for the slight. Ruairí Ó Murchú, the representative from Co. Louth, said the comments were “nonsense” and “The fact is, border people are no different to any other people in Ireland.” Another politician, Thomas Pringle from Donegal, had a more leftwing take: “it’s the product of the neglect of the ruling class, that Dukes represents, that makes people from border areas that way.” Dukes apologized.
But Ó Murchú’s response is just as simplistic as Dukes’ original one. Borderers are different, and Pringle pinpointed part of the reason: neglect by the centres of power. It has nothing to do with violence in the blood, but everything to do with loyalties: with their family and friends living across the border—which, in some places, means across the street—people feel more connected to their own than to the “ruling class” in the distant capital.
This isn’t just an Irish thing. For several years, I traveled regularly to remote parts of Nepal, many of which are populated by Tibetans. Even after living in Nepal for decades, these exiles practice Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan customs, and are culturally closer to Tibetans across the border in China than to the Brahmins of Kathmandu. Many refer to Nepal as if it were a distant, foreign country: to visit Kathmandu is to “visit Nepal.”
This local loyalty means that borderers take every opportunity to bypass or subvert the border. Just a few kilometres from Dundalk, inside Northern Ireland, is overwhelmingly nationalist South Armagh. During the Troubles, the British Army used to erect barricades to stop people—smugglers, rogues, assassins, and bombers escaping to the South—from using those pesky unapproved roads. The locals were having none of it. No sooner did the Army build the barricades than they were blown up by area residents.
Cross-border loyalty also meant that border communities were prepared to protect those in their midst who were on the run from security forces. To the chagrin of the British and of Northern Irish loyalists, IRA operatives could easily flee across the border to places like Dundalk. In the 1970s, they decided to hit back.
In 2022, I called Min, who was now living in Ontario. After a bit of family gossip, I asked her about that Friday in 1975.
Due to heavy holiday traffic, she and my dad were delayed leaving Dublin. Otherwise, the drive was pleasant, filled with light chatter and giggles. Before reaching Dundalk, they turned towards our home in the village of Blackrock. As they drove through the village, the dark mass of the Irish Sea to their right, the glow of pubs along Main St. pierced the night. High on a hill, the round tower of Blessed Oliver Plunkett overlooked its flock.
A newsflash came on the radio. At about 6:20, a car bomb had exploded outside Kay’s Tavern, next to our Dad’s office.
“I was thrown against a wall,” said a survivor later who was inside the bar. “I could feel what felt like waves hitting me. The bar burst into flames immediately… I saw a heavily built man, about 60 years. He was bleeding badly from the head. I grabbed him and headed towards the back of the bar … at that, the bar exploded. I think this was the spirits exploding.”
At the time though, there were few details. Min and Dad looked at each other in horror.
Some argue that, in border areas, identities mix like different colours of paint, but the border I knew was more like oil and water. In the 1920s, Northern Ireland was set up as a Protestant state, yet the border regions were dominated by Catholic communities who saw the state as their oppressor.
To understand more about border identities, I traveled to Belfast in late 2022 to meet with Cathal McCall. An expert on identity and culture in the border area, he was a professor at Queen’s University.
The Ulster Museum cafeteria clattered with cutlery on china and the laughter of families sharing tea, scones and stories they had told each other a million times. A flat, even light illuminated the large room. A few minutes early for my meeting, I ordered a cup of tea and took a seat at the only available table.
A slim, dark-haired man in his 40s entered through the glass doors. Though we hadn’t met, I recognized Cathal from his internet profile. After introducing ourselves, we plunged into a freewheeling conversation about border life. “The border has always been part of my consciousness,” he told me, “because I have family on both sides.”
He had a quiet demeanour and a sly sense of humour. He reminisced about past trips when his girlfriend, now his wife, visited from Scotland. Driving from Dungannon in the North to Cavan town in the South, they traveled that section of the border that loops back on itself, so you cross the border five times. “I said, ‘right, get your passport.’ We’re crossing the border, and she’s fumbling for her passport, and we cross it once. We’re in the South now. Oh! We’re back in the North! Oh! We’re in the South again!”
In time, his wife moved to Northern Ireland. He shook his head and chuckled. “She still berates me,” he said.
He loved the border in all its crazy topography, its complex history, its quirky people. The physical border, he said, was never much of an obstacle to borderers, who crossed back and forth in search of bargains. “Once I pulled into a petrol station, and there was this really old guy—must have been in his eighties—and he was lifting this ten-gallon tank. He had already filled his car. A ten-gallon tank into the boot, filled with petrol. And I say to the woman who is in charge, ‘this is a recipe for disaster!’ ‘Sure, he’s grand, he does it every week!’ she says!”
He was interested in “social groupness,” the feeling that you belong—“the sense of belonging in a certain group, and not in that group.” It is one thing to be Irish, but border has its own identity, he told me. “Some people say that [borderers] are different. They’re neither Southerners, nor Northerners. I tend to see the flip side of that, as both: we see both sides, we know we can fit quite well.”
Borderers cross back and forth regularly to shop or go to a pub. They have more exposure to people on the other side and identify with the same place. Now, with the physical border long gone, you would expect that the identities of those in Northern Ireland and in the Republic would blend together. But it’s more complicated than that, because the jurisdictional border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is not the same as the cultural border between unionists and nationalists.
Yet Cathal saw this cultural border, the one that divided Protestant from Catholic, slowly breaking down. “There’s unionists, nationalists—and others, so it’s a third, a third, a third.” These “others” tended to see themselves as Northern Irish, or British and Irish. “For them, the border is not a significant marker of identity—because they see themselves as belonging to both.”
From Belfast, I drove to Dundalk. The Town had not aged well in the forty years since I last visited. The layout of the streets was as I remembered it, though Market Square was no longer a cattle market but the forecourt of a trendy café. The cigarette and shoe factories had closed down, as had the brewery, though it had recently been replaced by a distillery. Kay’s Tavern was long gone, replaced by an arts centre. My dad’s old office building, at four storeys once the tallest building in town, was still standing, but just barely, its windows shuttered and paint peeling. Along once-vibrant Clanbrassil Street, several shop windows were boarded over.
I visited a bookstore. “Ah, Dundalk,” the bookseller shook his head. “The town the Celtic Tiger passed by,” referring to the negligible effect of Ireland’s much-vaunted economic boom in the Town.
Even if you can’t see it, the border is always there. From Dundalk, you can be in Northern Ireland in 20 minutes. No line on the road, no customs, no watchtowers. But, for many of the people I met, its presence was inescapable.
Outside Panama Café, Kenneth and Alisha, a couple in their 30s, are passing the afternoon over lattes and pastries. They have just returned from a cross-border retreat intended to bring the communities together. “We heard some awful stories,” says Alisha. “Bombs being thrown in the back garden, and people shot on the street, left there to be used as warnings.” They came away with profound sympathy for their northern neighbours.
But they are also fearful. “As a Catholic, going up to the North, you would be worried. Like, things would happen to you, d’you know what I mean?”
“It could be dangerous if you get caught in the wrong neighbourhood,” Alisha went on. “If you were to go up there for shopping or anything, you wouldn’t make yourself known a Catholic.”
Though the border has been open for the last quarter century, it still seems an invisible barrier. Later, in a Zoom call, I speak with Bernie Quinn, a veteran advocate and supporter of the LGBT+ community in Dundalk. She fills my screen with her irresistible blend of power and earthy charm. A former footballer—she played both Gaelic football and soccer—at 60, sporting short greying hair, tattoos and a gap-toothed smile, she is still an imposing presence. She has lived all her life in Dundalk.
The border is still an “invisible curtain,” she says. Though Northern Ireland is only a short drive away, it still feels foreign.
“I intimately know women, and have had relationships with women, in Galway, and Limerick, and Cork, and never in Newry, eight kilometers away.” Galway, Limerick and Cork are all more than 200 kilometres away, at the opposite side of the island—but all are in the Republic.
She tells me about some visitors who asked for a lift to the airport for a flight to Amsterdam. “‘Will you pick us up in the morning?’ I said no problem. What time do you have to be in Dublin for your flight?” asked Bernie.
“She said, ‘Bernie, we’re goin’ from Belfast.’”
From Dundalk, the distance to Belfast and to Dublin is almost exactly equal. This was recent—long after the Troubles; the drive would be in daylight; and there was no more risk in driving them to Belfast than to Dublin. Still, she was shocked.
“What? Fuckin’ Belfast? I have to drive you to Belfast? Why would you pick Belfast airport? What, what are you … why? Who would use Belfast? I absolutely could not believe that these two women feckin’ went and booked a trip [from Belfast]. It never would have crossed my mind to use Belfast airport.”
Nobel Laureate John Hume, a borderer from Derry, liked to dismiss the border with a wave of a rhetorical hand: the real border is not the line on the map, he claimed, but the one in the minds and hearts of people.
But the line on the map supports and reinforces the psychological one. A border is both the result of divisions and a cause of them. As the US and Israel have done, you can build a big, beautiful border wall; you can reinforce it with armed guards and razor wire. But when you do, it becomes more than a wall: it enters the minds and hearts of those who live near it.
If you ever take the wall down, don’t expect the border to disappear: this “soft” border is harder than any wall. It only took a few years after the Belfast Agreement for the physical border to be dismantled, but the psychological and cultural border is crumbling only slowly.
Two died in the 1975 Dundalk bombing, and over twenty were injured.
The next day, Min and Dad unlocked the door of his office. Inside, she gasped when she saw glass shards, flying daggers, embedded in his desk chair.
“I’ll never forget the smell, the sound, and feel of broken glass beneath my feet. We were lucky,” she said. “If he hadn’t decided to pick me up in Dublin, he would have been badly injured or killed.” She signed up as a volunteer at the local hospital, making beds, syringing out blisters, and spoon-feeding victims, some of them people she knew from our village.
In a photocopied letter, a division of the Ulster Defence Association—a loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland—claimed responsibility. It seems the British Army helped[3]. The UDA claimed the bombing was not intended to cause injury—a little difficult to believe—but expressed frustration about cross-border IRA activity, adding, “two can play at that game.”
Later, even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher mused about bombing Dundalk. “What would you say if Dundalk were bombed?” she asked Irish Taoiseach Garrett Fitzgerald in 1985. It’s hard to know how seriously to take that, but Thatcher, who had survived an assassination attempt by the IRA, was not known for empty threats.
Thatcher’s threat, if that’s what it was, only became public in 2015. When I read about it, I was almost flattered. Like other border communities, Dundalk gets little attention. Although it is only an hour’s drive from Dublin, it has always felt like its own world.
Any illusion that we were safe in the Republic was shattered by the bomb. “We weren’t safe when we went out to shop or have a coffee,” said Min. “If you saw a sports bag unattended you moved swiftly out of its way.”
The bomb also blew away the secrecy surrounding IRA activities in Dundalk. “Local doctors, dentists, pharmacists, Gardaí were all involved in some way,” Min went on. “I innocently thought that pillars of society would not get involved in terrorism. How wrong I was.”
Chance, or fate, or the hand of God—this would have been his version—saved my father that day. Christmas Day was his 59th birthday. He survived just six more. After his death, my mother moved to Dublin and I never returned to Dundalk, until later in 2022.
As Min and I parted, I reflected on our quirky hometown that I thought so drab and dull, yet with all this going on under the surface. At the time, I had not appreciated how much the border overshadowed our lives. The border, I could now see, was more than a line on a map; it was a region with its own distinct culture, its own ways of being, and sometimes its own dangers.
The bookseller told me a sad joke about the Town. An American visitor is standing on the quays, overlooking the Irish Sea. He is talking to a lobster fisherman who is dragging his pots, full of lobsters, off his boat. The visitor notices something odd about the pots: they are open at the top.
“Won’t the lobsters escape?” asks the American.
“Oh no,” laughs the fisherman, “them’s Dundalk lobsters. If one tries to get out, the others will drag him back.”
At the time, I wrote this off as tall-poppy syndrome: in Dundalk, you never get above yourself. It was that; but I know now it was something else too: the desperate loyalty of a border community, where we closed around each other and held tight.
END
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Footnotes
1
Also known as the Good Friday Agreement
2
The biggest exceptions are Bratislava in Slovakia, which borders Austria and Hungary; city-state Singapore, bordering Malaysia; and Rome, which of course borders the Vatican.
3
In the case of the Dundalk bomb, this allegation was not proven beyond doubt, but the bombing was linked to others at the time in which the security forces were shown to have been involved.
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David Dunne has published three books and many literary, managerial, and scholarly articles. Examples include: “Shut Your Eyes and See” (Literary Review of Canada), "Others Were Running Guns (Irish Times), and “Little Orphan Áine," (Literary Review of Canada). His books are about design as a way of thinking, and education. He grew up on the Irish border during the Troubles, and is writing an essay collection about the border after Brexit. LinkedIn: ddunne. Website: ddunne.ca.