An Irishman's Diary

DUBLIN PRIDES ITSELF on being, among other things, a city of two halves: a notion cherished equally by the supposed snobs of the southside and the inverted snobs of the north. But the division is largely a myth. For a town with a real north-south fault-line, you have to travel 30 miles outside the capital, to Drogheda.

Drogheda is in fact a smaller version of Budapest – that’s to say, a union of what used to be two separate conurbations on either side of a river. Drogheda-in-Louth, on the north of the Boyne, was the Buda in this arrangement. Drogheda-in-Meath was the Pest, and in more ways than one.

The two towns were in different church dioceses, and had separate corporations. Crucially, they also had rival tax regimes. And when Drogheda-in-Meath became effectively a duty-free zone, undercutting its neighbour and attracting all the visiting ships to the southern side of the port, the always-simmering conflict between the towns turned violent.

In the wake of one “sanguinary engagement” in 1412, a local Dominican friar persuade the factions that they should merge. He made his appeal on the Feast of All Saints, 600 years ago today. And whatever about saints, King Henry IV subsequently blessed the union, elevating the new, greater Drogheda to the status of a county borough.

The river Boyne thus became a symbol of unity rather than division (for another 278 years anyway). And the two halves of the town have co-existed peacefully ever since. Even if, to this day, residents on either bank refer to the others as being from “the far side”.

One small irony of the unification is that, although it started with a churchman, and in a church, the Drogheda merger did not extend to religion. Thus the south side of Drogheda remains, even now, in the diocese of Meath. The north side remains in Armagh. No surrender there.

Confused readers may by this point be remembering an event from the early 1990s called the “Drogheda 800”. If the town is only 600 now, you ask, what was that about? Well, readers, that was the tail-end of a remarkable series of year-long urban commemorations – founded on varying degrees of historic authenticity – that coincided, or were forced to, with the last recession.

The phenomenon began with the Galway 500 in 1984 and quickly went viral, spreading to Cork (the so-called “800”) in 1985, and then engulfing Dublin, in full-blown millennium form (1988).

The inflationary element didn’t stop there, continuing with the “Dundalk 1200” in 1989. And hyper-inflation had set in by 1993 when the “Mayo 5000” celebrated that alleged anniversary of the Céide Fields, without so much as producing a royal charter to prove it.

By contrast, the Drogheda 800 (1994) was a relatively modest affair. But marking as it did the first granting of a charter to Drogheda-in-Meath, that was a potentially divisive anniversary. Whereas the 600 celebrations, which start today, can be embraced with equal enthusiasm on both (far) sides of the river.

Maybe, having been late for the last trend, Drogheda will start a new one with this celebration of conflict resolution. Dublin can’t compete in the area of formal unification. Nevertheless, it used to have warring factions on either side of the Liffey: most infamously the southside “Liberty Boys” – weavers and tailors from the Coombe – and the northside “Ormond Boys”, butchers from the food markets off Ormond Quay.

Their rivalry was so bitter that fighting between them sometimes closed the city quays – the front line in their struggle – for whole days. That was the late 1700s. But maybe somebody somewhere will find a peace agreement dating from 1813 or thereabouts. Then we can have a Dublin 200 festival next year.

In any case, celebrations of the fully-documented Drogheda 600 start tonight with a “poetry show” in the Droichead Arts Centre. Admission is free and other musical and literary events will follow throughout the month. What is perhaps the keynote event, however, will be on November 11th.

Then, the annual Remembrance Day service in St Peter’s Church of Ireland will double as an ecumenical celebration of 600 years of harmony, with music by composer Michael Holohan and local musicians, soloists and choirs.

It’s a fitting venue, since it was on this site that the Drogheda peace process started in 1412. Indeed, St Peter’s has been the pivot around which much of the town’s history, good and bad, has revolved. It was in the steeple here that 80 royalists tried to escape Cromwell. They tried in vain: he lit a fire under under them.

The aforementioned Holohan is also one of the organisers of Drogheda 600, an event that has no official funding and is therefore completely dependent on volunteers like him. He’s only a “blow-in”, self-described, in his adopted town. But he’s an interesting case, being a Dubliner born in Drumcondra because, even in Drogheda, he lives on the northside.