South Armagh is ready to sing a different song

Peter Makem talks with almost evangelical zeal about south Armagh. His campaign to convert non-believers to the potential of the place dubbed "bandit country" since the start of the Troubles requires the commitment of a zealot.

"We are trying to extract the pearl from the oyster," says the writer and former manager of Armagh's Gaelic football team. "South Armagh is Ireland's last great secret." If Makem and his fellow enthusiasts have their way this secret will soon be out. In two weeks, the first Tommy Makem International School of Song begins, counting Bob Dylan, Liam Neeson and Seamus Heaney among its patrons. A neat slogan "singers not sangars" is already on the lips of locals in reference to British army installations such as the Borucki sangar, a watchtower in Crossmaglen. Dozens of American and European folk artists have been persuaded to come here by a promise of a week of storytelling, singing, lectures, music and sightseeing.

Musician Tommy Makem, Peter's uncle, believes south Armagh has been so denigrated and vilified for the past 30 years that "it is generally believed there is only a dark side". The idea of the school is to put forward an alternative view.

"South Armagh is filled with ancient sites and monuments, it has an unsurpassed song tradition and musical heritage, it has produced some of the finest native-speaking poets in any Western European culture," he said. It has also been the scene of some of the worst atrocities of the Troubles and it is this image of an IRA heartland and a smugglers' paradise which gives those promoting south Armagh a mountain the size of Slieve Gullion to climb.

But Peter Makem believes the clouds of misperception can be lifted. He describes south Armagh as a magical kingdom, a place rich in culture, dramatic scenery and warm welcomes. The Ring of Gullion, "a geological freak of nature" says Makem, comprises a lava intrusion that circles the majestic Slieve Gullion and rivals any of this Island's natural tourist attractions. Yet, for the outsider, signs of abnormality are almost as riveting as the breathtaking scenery.

Ominous, all-seeing observation towers planted like alien trees on mountain tops mean a Big Brother sense of constantly being watched is difficult to shake off. Equally disconcerting is the occasional whirr of helicopters and the sight of young soldiers carrying guns as they roam villages and fields.

Makem has approached local Sinn Fein members about the possibility of removing some of the more conspicuous signs that this is no ordinary rural area, for the duration of the festival. Signs such as "Sniper At Work" would have even the bravest tourists sleeping uneasily in their B&Bs.

Each village, each landmark, has a horror story attached. A stop for a quiet drink at the Three Steps pub is impossible without imagining the night Capt Robert Nairac was bundled away to his death from the car-park outside. His body was never found. Last week two locals stood at the window of the pub watching British soldiers alight from helicopters and tramp through fields.

Bessbrook, a picture-postcard Quaker village, evokes the murder of 24-year-old Lance Bombadier Stephen Restorick at an army checkpoint in 1997 and the Kingsmills massacre in the 70s. Because of its Quaker tradition, Bessbrook has no pubs but in nearby Camlough they are plentiful and range in colour from lurid purple to chequered green-and-orange. In the Two Roses cafe, local teacher Dominic Bradley is having lunch after a meeting with the army to request less frequent helicopter flights while students are doing their exams.

"We want to tell people to come to south Armagh, to meet the people, they are divided in their interests and views. It's not a homogenous group and the culture is equally diverse," he says.

Visiting the area with Maud Gonne in 1904, Yeats described the nearby village of Forkhill as the most picturesque in Ireland. For decades now, the beauty has been spoiled by an army barracks visible from the street where Pat Toner, an SDLP councillor since 1973, and his wife Christine live. They have got used to the cups and saucers rattling when the helicopters are around despite the British government-supplied triple glazing on the windows. They say they have endured a kind of silent suffering over the past 30 years. "The decent people of south Armagh have been through an awful lot, people put out of their homes, rockets being launched over their heads . . . Living here in Forkhill we were seen to be tolerant of the army by the paramilitaries and meanwhile we were in the middle of it all," says Pat.

At a pub in Crossmaglen the talk is of the Borucki sangar and other military installations in the area being dismantled. Locals don't believe it will ever happen. "It's not something that will happen in my day anyway," says one elderly patron. The owner of the bar, Paddy Short, an uncle of Clare Short MP, agrees. "Don't mention the sangar for God's sake," he says. "I have had 30 years of it and I've no more faith." As he talks the picture on the television is regularly distorted, a reaction to radar equipment carried by passing soldiers. Paddy told a group of Americans last week that he had the television fitted with a special device that would alert him to their presence. "And they believed me," he chuckles.

Short makes no secret of his opposition to the British army presence but is anxious to stress that the area's tiny Protestant community "was never touched in Cross". The local Church of Ireland vicar, Rev Mervyn Kingston, has 24 parishioners around Creggan and Crossmaglen. "We are left alone," he says. "Although there was always the ghost of fear that some night there would be a knock on the door it never happened. I knew when I was appointed here I was coming to decent people."

And now the decent people of south Armagh want a chance to sing a different song. Down on the shores of Camlough ("crooked lake") Len Graham and John Campbell are singing ballads and telling stories written in times dominated by everyday concerns.

Watching the musicians, Peter Makem says that throughout the Troubles south Armagh became a dumping ground for all of Northern Ireland's ills. "The psychology is all wrong. When we look on ourselves as a limb of somewhere else, belonging elsewhere, we are creating a province. When we shape ourselves as the centre of everywhere we are creating the heartland of a people and a nation," he says. Makem believes this "centrehood" is the key to the future. "When the festival starts, for one week we want to be the centre of the world, that would be a brilliant new beginning for south Armagh," he says.

The Tommy Makem International School of Song takes place from June 3rd to June 10th. For more information call 028 30267517

ringle@irish-times.ie