SEÁN AND Rita Martin, of Dundalk, used to go to Newry every week. “Thursday was half day in Dundalk and we’d all flock to Newry. Just to walk around and go to the market up there. We’d get red apples and cakes and go to the Shelbourne Cafe. They had lovely sponges.”
The Martins still live above their shop in Dundalk, although it is now leased to another proprietor. Theirs was a family business, a drapery, which bore the name of Rita’s father, Owen McCaul. Mr McCaul had served his apprenticeship as a draper in Dundalk at the same time as Owen McNamee.
The two families remained friendly, and one of the places Seán and Rita used to visit on their daytrips to Newry was McNamee’s shop in the town. Although the Martins drove to Newry, many Dundalk people got one of the two buses which ran between the towns each day. “You’d meet all the Dundalk business people in Newry on a Thursday afternoon,” says Rita Martin.
Even in the 1950s, when Seán and Rita made their regular trips, this had been going on for years. Rita Martin’s father, Owen McCaul, had been in the old IRA with Frank Aiken. He did not approve of people from the South supporting the Northern Irish state by shopping there. But no one could stop them. Owen McCaul’s customers used to go to Newry too. “The bus stop was directly outside our shop and we’d watch people getting off the bus with the blankets they had bought in Newry, says Rita Martin.
Dundalk was the main shopping town of the northeast. Farmers from South Armagh used to patronise Owen McCaul’s drapery business. “The country people used to drive in to shop with us once a year,” remembers Rita Martin. You can see the remnants of this retail grandeur on Clanbrassil Street. The fine shopfront of James Deavey’s, established 1834, stands idle. It was once the biggest shop in the town, a department store which had previously been owned by a family called Patterson. About four years ago Deavey’s premises closed, bought – “for a huge price” say local shopkeepers – by a Monaghan property developer, along with several other shops on the street. The developer planned to make a large shopping unit. But that plan has not materialised and Deavey’s stands empty. As empty as the Dundalk branch of Superquinn, due to close next month, soon will be. Local shopkeepers point out that Dundalk has three Dunnes Stores, two Tescos, a Lidls and a second Aldi due to open shortly – an awful lot of grocery outlets for a town its size, even one with a young population and a lot of people who commute to Dublin each day.