Newry: Don't Mention the War by Vitali Vitaliev

As I was preparing for my first foray to Northern Ireland, the advice of my omniscient Dublin friends was categorical: “Don’t poke your nose into politics, and you’ll be OK!” Well, to be honest, my poor nose was not in a condition to be poked anywhere: a respiratory infection, contracted the week before, made it swell to the size of a large Irish spud. I was only hoping that “The Gap of the North”, another name for Newry, my destination, would be wide enough to accommodate it.

Why Newry, you may ask?

Having written a lot on borders and frontiers of all kinds, I was instinctively curious about the first town (sorry, city: the status was conferred on Newry in 2002) on the northern side of the border, separating the euro-zone from the pound-zone and Ireland from ... er... Ireland.

My intention was to focus exclusively on mundane cross-border matters - currency, roads, healthcare, communications, prices - and to stay as far away from politics as possible.

To be able to look into all those properly, I made a short “laundry list” of the things I needed to take: 1.Some euros. 2. Some pounds sterling (I could only get hold of a £20 note, issued by the Bank of Scotland). 3. Some letters to be posted to Britain and to Southern Ireland. 4. My swollen, yet running (God knows where to – probably towards Newry) nose. 5. My British passport (I was going abroad, after all!) 6. My British NHS card.

My rationale for inclusion of the last item was simple: why should I cough up 50 euros to see a GP in Dublin, when I could see one for free on the British territory, i.e. in Newry? A writer’s life itself often becomes research...

The bus journey towards the border was smooth, if not to count several road-toll booths. After Dundalk, the booths disappeared, but the road became much bumpier. I was looking in the window, blowing my nose and munching a stale sausage-roll, acquired in Dublin for staggering E3.50 the day before.

The border itself was ghostly and easy to overlook for someone who wasn’t watching. But I was. First I spotted an oblong shed with a mysterious sign “Customs Facilitation Office” (as far as I knew, there were no customs barriers between Ireland and ... Ireland, i.e. they had already been “facilitated” to the extreme). Then came a row of dodgy-looking money-changing outlets. “British Spy Post. Demilitarize Now!” ran a colorful billboard, topped with scull and crossbones. Having guessed it had something to do with ‘politics’, I pretended not to have noticed it. I also tried to ignore a couple of rather overcrowded cemeteries.

The road signs suddenly became green, strictly monolingual and were showing distance in miles, but it was only when I saw a sign saying Give Way instead of Yield that I yielded (sorry, gave way) to the fact that we were already in the UK.

A huge juicy rainbow, with one end in Ireland and the other – in the other Ireland, was bridging two parts of the same small nation, dissected by the non-existing frontier.

Having dropped the bag at my Newry hotel, I briefly contemplated the idea of having a pint in one of the inviting little pubs in County Down across the bridge (the hotel was in County Armagh, on the opposite bank of the River Clanrye), but rejected it and decided to visit a pharmacy instead. This could have well been a life-saving decision, but I didn’t know it then...

“How do you live there, in the rip-off South?” asked a friendly pharmacist at Felix McNally’s drug-store when I pretended (for purposes of research, why else?) that I only had euros in my wallet. She agreed to accept them, yet at a “special Newry exchange rate”, whereby ten euros were equal to £6.50. Even so, I paid almost twice as little for the pills as they would cost me in Dublin.

Having popped into a take-away shop next door and not feeling particularly hungry, I could not resist the temptation of buying a sausage roll, priced at incredible 80 pence! Even with the shop’s own “special Newry exchange rate” of just £6 for ten euros, it was an unbelievable bargain compared to Dublin. “Can it be that a third, phantom, currency – the Newro – is circulated in this town/city?” I was wondering, puzzled by the evasive exchange rates fluctuating from shop to shop.

It was 7.30 pm. As I was putting my untouched E1.20 sausage roll into a bin, a gunman wearing a cheap Halloween mask stumbled into a crowded McSwiggan’s pub in Newry’s Water Street (a couple of hundred yards from where I was) and – paramilitary-style - shot a man and a woman sitting at the bar in the legs three times before escaping. I only learned about the incident from the following day’s papers.

The rest of the evening was spent in my hotel room, trying to work out the intricacies of cross-border phoning. It was encouraging to be able to call my friends in London and Edinburgh (both hundreds of miles away from Newry) at discount National British rates. It was mildly intimidating to have to dial the international code (and hence to pay International rates) to get through to Dundalk – just ten miles across the border. Luckily, I didn’t know anyone in Dundalk and was therefore spared the expense of calling it.

Next morning I felt lousy. My distended nose was blocked. An uninterrupted buzzing noise from the headphones I wasn’t wearing resounded in my clogged ears. A faulty didgeridoo (or was it a broken Irish bagpipe?) was playing inside my brick-heavy head. I needed to see a doctor. Luckily, the Newry Medical Village, comprising a number of surgeries, pharmacies and a hospital, was just outside my hotel.

Meadowlands Surgery, which I chose at random was full of people, mostly little old ladies, patiently waiting for their call. “I need to see a GP,” I said to the receptionist brandishing my NHS card.

It transpired that the card was unnecessary, for residents of Southern Ireland were entitled to free treatment in the UK. I looked at the old ladies, these “God’s dandelions”, to use a nice Russian expression, and wondered whether they were all visitors from the South, too.

“What if you fell ill while in Dublin?” I tactlessly asked Dr JJ Torney, a facetious bespectacled man, as he was measuring my blood pressure. “I would have to pay to see a GP, but could claim the money back on return. It’s interesting how many people from the South suddenly feel unwell when they come here on shopping expeditions... I don’t mean you of course,” he chuckled.

The antibiotic, prescribed by Dr Torney, took its toll, and soon I was sitting inside a café perusing morning newspapers and sipping an espresso. The espresso was awful, but, on the positive side, I was able to puff away for all I was worth – an almost forgotten delight.

Everyone was smoking in Newry – as if the town (sorry, the city) itself was suffering from some collective tobacco-related newrosis. Smoking seemed compulsory in most pubs, cafes and restaurants.

Remembering my Dublin friends’ advice, I rather enjoyed leafing through the totally apolitical “Armagh – Down Observer” that seemed to contain just two types of “coverage”: reports of unruly local drivers and sets of family and school photos. “Motorist Accused of Stopping Suddenly” was one of the paper’s headlines that reminded me of a heading I once saw in The Shetland Times: “Driver Swerves to Avoid Sheep”.

The stories, carried by the Belfast-based Irish News, however, were different: “Sectarian attack on youth group”, “22 children victims of shootings and attacks”, “Man is shot in lower leg”, and next to it – “Two hurt in pub shooting”. That was how I learned about the previous night’s incident in Newry. Staying away from politics was not that easy while in Ulster.

Newry was pretty. Enclosed by the Mourne Mountains, it combined hustle-and-bustle of a mini-city with friendly cosiness of a small town to create a truly welcoming spirit, unspoiled by disproportionate number of windswept (both outside and inside) shopping malls, targeting bargain-hunters from the South.

The historic Newry town hall was built in 1893 on a bridge astride the river, dividing two counties – allegedly, to settle the rivalry between the people of Armagh and Down. It stood there now as a classical red-brick memento of the all-but-forgotten, yet much-needed by modern Ulster, art of compromise.

It was hard to imagine a town more peaceful than modern Newry, where two currencies, two counties and two countries seemed to co-exist rather happily. One didn’t want to think that not so long ago it was one of the world’s most dangerous places.

In the local Museum, I was shown an official Report, according to which “13% of all the Troubles related fatalities in Northern Ireland took place in the Newry region ... that accounted for only 5,3% of the Northern Ireland population”. It was “the fifth most violent urban area” in Ulster.

“The attack had nothing to do with the paramilitaries – it was just a copy-cat attempt to resolve family feud,” Rory Murphy, a young barman at McSwiggan’s assured me from behind the bar. I was the only customer in the pub that early afternoon. I simply couldn’t leave Newry without finding out what happened in the pub.

A strong smell of disinfectant was hanging in the air, and fruit machines were winking sinisterly in semi-darkness. Rory, who witnessed the attack, readily “re-enacted” it for me en situ. He then pointed to a fresh bullet scratch on the wooden bar stand, about twenty inches above the floor. I thought I could discern two dark spots under a stool next to it.

“It is so out of character with the town now,” sighed the barman. His view was shared by Henry Reilly, the popular mayor of Newry – the first Unionist mayor in the whole history of this predominantly Catholic town - whom I met an hour later. “We have generous and genuine people here,” he said, “They have gone through a lot of suffering, and it will take several generations to change the violence-oriented sectarian mentality completely. It is changing already. Look at me: I served in the British Army – and still I am accepted.”

He was right about the mentality, of course. Old habits die hard, and euthanasia doesn’t quite work here. Time was indeed Newry’s best and only newropathologist.

“Newry has little to sustain more than a short visit, and you are unlikely to be tempted to stay,” affirms one superficial modern guidebook. The last thing I did before leaving was posting two letters – to a friend in London (it cost me 26 p) and to myself in Dublin (40 p), just to check which one would arrive first. One, sent to London, was delivered to the addressee the following day.

In Dublin, I am still waiting for my letter from Newry, the town (sorry, the city) where I was very much “tempted to stay”.