Our Council of the 1960s, under pressure from Government departments and various interest groups, capitulated to demands to raze an historic and much loved part of our town to make way for the principal trunk road between Ireland’s major cities of Belfast and Dublin. The decision was incomprehensible. And very unpopular
History
Poor Clare Sisters
It would be difficult to exaggerate the contribution made by the Sisters of Saint Clare to the education and social welfare of the children of Newry’s working classes for the past one hundred and seventy three years.
Butter Market: A Short History
The Butter and Egg Market was erected in 1874 in Market Street, at the foot of High Street. I shall have to make a return visit to my friend, Ben Hughes who still resides in the locality, to revive my memories of those few details of it that he shared last time with me.
Prisoners in Bridewell
The Bridewell, where the army was stationed during the war, was the largest and most impressive building in our district and the more mysterious for housing those not of our nation – much less of our area.
Wartime Smuggling
Smuggling reached a peak in the War years. The British enforced a blockade of the ports of the neutral Irish Free State and consequently there were many items available to us in the North that were not for sale in the South. It cut the other way too! Things were not requisitioned there for the war effort. For example they had plenty of cloth and the Dromintee pahvee came into his own.
Unapproved Roads
You can recall the time of the ‘unapproved border crossing roads’? Large signs were erected, with the legend: ‘motor traffic between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State is prohibited on this road’.
Creggan Poets
You have gotten used to the placid view of Creggan Churchyard. Still used today as the burial place of those of both faiths in the neighbourhood, it is celebrated rightly as the final home of the last bards of the twilight age of the old Gaelic order in the Kingdom of the Fews.
Crossmaglen Conspiracy
The so-called Crossmaglen Conspiracy of the 1880s rocked the Liberal Government of the time, brought the resignations of Joseph Chamberlain and of O. J. Trevelyan and the return, following a general election, of a Tory Government.
Boys of Crossmaglen
In the normal scheme of things, far removed from that two-word misnomer of the easily forgotten Pro-Consol Merlyn Rees – a slur I choose not to repeat! – South Armagh now struggles to return to that idyllic rural backwater it was of old, preserver of the best of our ancient customs that the Newry Journal extols.