You can leave your home place, but it never leaves you, writes Frank McNally. Although he lives in Dublin and his children are Dubliners, he is a Co Monaghan man at heart.
The main street of Carrickmacross is defined by a Protestant church at one end and a courthouse at the other. Like a good Catholic, I'd never been in either until recently. But curiosity got the better of me last year and passing the church one Sunday, I slipped in the door.
It was an unnerving experience. There was a service on, and the building (200-year-old Planters Gothic) is a small one. So was the congregation. My plan was to blend in with the background, but I couldn't find a background anywhere. Suddenly conscious that I didn't look Protestant, I lost my nerve and slipped out again, trying to appear casual, as if I'd mistaken the place for a hardware shop.
So all these years on, I'm still discovering the town. The courthouse remains a mystery. But at least in the case of Carrick's other citadel, the one that guards the approach from Dublin, I'm nearly a regular visitor. The St Louis girls' school is something of a fortress, occupying the site where the third Earl of Essex built a castle in 1630; and as teenage boys, we used to lay siege to it every day at lunchtime.
I made it inside the walls in 1977 when, on a team from the Patrician Brothers High School, I debated the prospects of a third world war, in Irish, in front of 400 schoolgirls. I was so nervous that if the war had broken out there and then it would have been a welcome distraction. A few years ago I returned as a guest speaker, this time in English, which was even worse.
Carrick was border country long before the Border. It was where the North began, and still is. The Pale stopped just south of here, as did the second earl of Essex (father of the castle builder) when Elizabeth I dispatched him and an army in 1599 to put down Hugh O'Neill. Essex had orders not to return until the rebel was subdued. But O'Neill had words with him in a local river, and Essex went home without a fight, starting a chain of events that ended with the loss of his head in the Tower of London.
These were wild parts long after that. Also just south of town is Wild Goose Lodge, site of a greyhound schooling track where I used to go with a neighbour, when we'd be plotting coups against the bookies in Dundalk. The hunting lodge is long gone, but in 1816 it was the setting for a gothic horror story, actual and literary.
It started with a raid by "Ribbonmen," a Catholic secret society. This led to hangings, the revenge burning of the lodge with a family inside, then more hangings - 18 of them - with the bodies gibbeted around the countryside for months afterwards. Enter the writer William Carleton, who saw the gibbets while walking from Tyrone to Dublin in 1817. In a preface to his famous story, he notes delicately that no fruit was eaten in the area that autumn.
The modern Border didn't impinge all that much. Connected to South Armagh by song (From Carrickmacross to Crossmaglen /there are more rogues than honest men), and by seven miles of winding road, Carrick was never itself a republican stronghold. But two events in another corner of Ireland brought the Troubles home. The first was in 1979, when a local IRA man Tom McMahon was convicted of the explosion that killed Lord Mountbatten in Co Sligo.
The second was in Co Leitrim in 1983, when a school-friend of mine and a member of the Irish debating team, Gary Sheehan, was killed in the gun-battle that ended the Don Tidey kidnap. He'd just joined the Garda and was still training when called out to help the search. He was the one who found the dug-out in the woods. He was 23. I have his signature on my school history book, collected with those of other classmates before we left.
Another signature reads "P. Slasher". This was the pseudonym of class comedian Pat "The Slasher" McEneaney (it's a family nickname, not a description), who has since metamorphosed into the country's top GAA referee. It's a struggle now to reconcile the schoolboy I remember, giving hilarious running commentaries on his own football skills, with the authority figure who brilliantly kept the lid on last weekend's Dublin-Armagh match.
We lived on a farm on the northern edge of town. From the hill behind, there's a glorious view across the basket-of-eggs drumlin country to Slieve Gullion, and beyond that the Cooley and Mourne mountains. Facing west, there's a lonelier view of the hills of Co Cavan. But down at road level, we were urban. With the advance of the bungalows, the street lighting eventually stretched past the gate, and from the nearby tile factory, we had the low hum of industry permanently in our ears.
I got my first real summer job there. Among the things I wasted the money on was an electric guitar, bought from another school-mate, Breffni O'Rourke. Part of the deal was a dodgy amplifier that at night received Radio Moscow, the English-language propaganda station. It was all over the airwaves then and the reception from my amp was as good as any radio. I never mastered the guitar, but I nearly turned communist trying.
Next door to our house is the Carrick Rovers soccer pitch. It's a small nondescript field, but in 1993 became briefly famous.
Before two world cup qualifiers, Jack Charlton's Ireland needed a country retreat, with easy access to fishing, golf, and Dublin. Carrick's Nuremore Hotel met all requirements and with the recreation sorted, Charlton scheduled quiet training sessions on the local pitch.
Unfortunately, about 3,000 people turned up, causing congestion so bad that the team were lucky to get out in time for USA '94. I had a perfect view, being able to step from the roof of one of our farm buildings onto the roof of the dressing rooms (it's an intimate setting), where Matt Kavanagh of The Irish Times was training his lens on Roy Keane. I think the word "surreal" describes my experience, although Roy might have had other words for it.
These days, Carrickmacross is "Kavanagh Country". But the poet had a prickly relationship with Co Monaghan, and the feeling was mutual. As is often the case with dead writers, he's remembered more fondly with every passing year and on the road towards Inniskeen, he's commemorated with an eerily effective silhouette sculpture.
Ironically, he shares this honour with an extinct animal. A skeleton of the Giant Irish Deer the largest deer that ever lived - was found here and donated to the Natural History Museum (where it greets you at the door). Its profile in black iron stands near the poet.
As Kavanagh knew, you can leave your home place, but it never leaves you. I've been in Dublin more than half my life, and my children are Dubliners (although I still love them). But once a Monaghan man, always.
The night before the Dubs' visit to Clones recently, I found myself scouring the city for a large Dublin flag. Not for personal use, of course. It was an errand for a Carrick publican who was hoping to waylay the latest invaders from the Pale as they journeyed north. I didn't know him personally, but it seemed a good cause.
