Battered resort cautious in its expectations

ROSTREVOR is on the breathtaking coast road which skims the Mournes between Newcastle and Newry. Before the Troubles there was a sizeable population here of retired British majors and colonels living in the solid cut stone houses.

But they have left or died. Rostrevor is now mainly Catholic.

And before the Troubles tourists were also plentiful, but they are gone, too.

There are now no hotels in Rostrevor. In the early 1970s there were three - the Great Northern, the Roxboro and the Ballyedmond - but they were all blown up by the IRA.

The ceasefire created an opening for a regeneration of the tourism trade, says Mr Anthony Williamson, a local councillor of independent politics and independent mind. He hopes tourism still can be developed without damaging the locale.

Formerly an Alliance Party member who, a little incongruously, was also chairman of the Down GAA county board, he has been threatened in his time by both loyalist and republican paramilitaries. "It's not a nice thing for your family," he says understatedly.

There were times at the worst of the Troubles when he thought of getting out to Canada, or to the South. "But where would you find a place like Rostrevor?"

So he stayed, serving on Newry and Mourne Council as an Alliance member and later as an independent nationalist councillor.

"There's no need for these elections, but now that we have them, they must lead to all party talks - without preconditions. People talk about having no guns under the table. Well, I believe there must be no preconditions under the table," he says.

Tommy Sands - one of the musical Sands family - lives just outside Rostrevor. His home has a spacious sun porch looking across the gleaming waters of Carlingford Lough at the Cooley Mountains of Co Louth. At his back is the grand sweep of the Mournes.

The setting and the light are magnificent. Here Tommy feels contentedly Irish, firmly anchored in the Ulster landscape, and in the local Co Down community. People and places are more important than "fruitless" elections, he feels.

He is an optimistic individual, but he almost despairs at the thought of the election. "Politics is supposed to be the art of compromise, but over here it's the only profession which refuses to compromise.

After the IRA broke its ceasefire Tommy travelled to London with Roy Arhuckle, a Lambeg drummer from the Protestant Waterside area of Derry. They played a lament outside the Houses of Parliament, joined by Sarajevan cellist Vedran Smailovic, Tommy's buddy.

"We played my own composition, The Music of Healing. It was for the people who died at Canary Wharf and for the politicians who refuse to talk," Tommy explains.

He tells a yarn of Zen Buddhist flavour to illustrate the point.

"Vedran is an amazing character. During the war in Bosnia he put on his dickey bow and monkey suit each night to play his cello in Sniper Alley in Sarajevo," says Tommy, again prompting the question: what was the purpose of it all?

"Exactly," says Tommy. "Well, a CNN reporter asked the same question. `Vedran', he asked, `Aren't you crazy playing the cello while the Serbs are bombing Sarajevo?

"And Vedran replied: `Why don't you ask the Serbs? Aren't they crazy bombing Sarajevo while I am playing the cello?'"

As regards the election, Tommy is not enthusiastic. "The nature of Northern elections is that people retreat to their traditional corners. Elections don't prove anything up here, but if they do lead to talks then that will be good."

And as for the future: "There will be a settlement here, and that will involve a link to Dublin, and a link to London, and a link to Europe. What's wrong with that?"