The Badger's Sett

Inspired by 1169 and Counting, I added a bunch of entries to the Republican Prisoner Roll of Honour.

I just found my house on Google Maps street view and I notice that they took the picture on a day when I was flying the Tricolor.

He tries to keep in the shadows as much as possible, but a key bit of his past has come to light: P. O'Neill is from Coalisland and he was jailed in Crumlin Road jail during the Border Campaign.

If the second half of this story is true, it's pretty depressing: McCartney Sisters May Emigrate. After making such a fuss about kicking the men involved in the Robert McCartney murder out of Sinn Fein and telling people to go to the police with what you know, it appears that the people involved are back in the party and siphoning off tax money with what the mob used to call 'no work' jobs. And none of the 60 people in the pub that night went to the police. It's just like New York in the 1960s or 70s only with the IRA instead of the Gambino family.

Back after only 2 1/2 months to note that PPS14 has apparently been overturned: Rural home applications reviewed. Of course this is a couple of weeks after my brother-in-law paid 150 lbs to appeal the denial of my mother-in-law's plans. But maybe at least the appeal means she'll be able to bypass the main review queue and get processed by the shorter appeals queue. Or maybe she'll get to the appeal and then they'll tell her to go back to the end of the main review queue. Either way good news for families who want to stay on the ancestral farm.

Now in folklore corner... the story of Washing Bay

At the southwest corner of Lough Neagh there is a semicircular bay called Washing Bay. The creek that flows in to the lough at that point is called the Holy River. I used to wonder what was up with those names, and I ran across it in a book a while back. The story doesn't seem to be on the web so I figured today was a good day to post it, as you will see.

I had always figured that the 'washing' in Washing Bay came from the fact that the local populace used to come wash their laundry there. But the actual reason ties in with the Holy River. From time immemorial the Holy River has been held to have healing powers. The story is that every year on the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist you could be healed of what ailed you by the waters of the Holy River and the Washing Bay. If you washed your afflicted body part in the river or bay on the appropriate day (June 23 as the feast of St. John the Baptist is on June 24) and tied a red rag in the branches of a tree overlooking the river or bay, by the time the rag rotted and fell off you'd be cured.

At it's height just before the famine in the mid-1800's, there would be hundreds or thousands of bathers from all around Ulster washing in the bay on June 23. I would be interested to know if anybody is down there today, but I know the custom still lives on a little bit. As you cross over the bridge that goes over the Holy River if you look down to the side you can still see a few red rags tied in the branches of the trees.

If I was a farmer in Tyrone I'd watch out. The cattle have finally had enough and they're rising up to take over. The third farmer in a month was killed by a bull near Cookstown: Farmer dies after being attacked by bull in pen

I'm reading The Hunger Strikes by R. K. Walker and I came across three more names I had missed from the Republican Prisoners Roll of Honour: Joseph Murphy, Dan Downey, and Joe Witty. They have been duly added. Other than that I would rate the book as OK. It seems to put a lot of present day Sinn Fein slant on incidents that were probably a lot different at the time, and it leaves out the role of the INLA assasination of Airey Neave as a motivation for the shooting campaign against the H-Block campaign leaders (most of whom were associated with the INLA). Plus there are a lot of editorial mistakes: capitalization errors, spelling errors, etc.

I added another entry to the Republican Prisoner Roll of Honour. This one is sort of vague. In August 1922 the interned Republican prisoners set a fire in Portlaoise jail. During the ensuing disturbance the guards shot and killed one of the prisoners. Unfortunately the information I've been able to find is somewhat contradictory.

According to the first comment in 104 year old Veteran views ‘Wind that shakes the Barley’, the prisoner was named Paddy Hickey and was from Dublin. The comment is a quotation from a 2002 article in Saoirse. But according to two mentions in The IRA in the Twilight Years 1923-1948 his name was Jim Hickey and he was from Cork. The rest of the details match up so he must be the same person. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any other mentions of the incident to try to clarify it.

Added Tom Smith to the Republican Prisoner Roll of Honour. Not sure how I managed to miss somebody killed in the 26 Counties as late as 1975, but he's on the list now.

Thanks to Lord Rooker this was an interesting weekend at the Badger's sett, full of frantic calls and emails across the Atlantic. The proposed restrictions on the construction of new single houses in rural areas of the Six Counties has the potential to really hose up our plans to move there.

According to the British government, the new rules will only apply to applications received after 16 March and our plans were in about three weeks before that so in theory we should be OK. But unofficially we have heard from my wife's brother and one of her cousins that they started rejecting almost all applications a couple of months ago in order to force people to reapply under the new rules (note: the linked file is a PDF but they named it incorrectly so you'll have to save it and then manually open it with Acrobat).

My brother-in-law was full of talk of Davitt and Parnell and the Land League and The English can't tell us what to do in our country.

Even under the new rules I'm pretty sure our house will still qualify, but we might have to modify our plan to make the house smaller and/or include the stone house we're replacing as a garage or utility room or something. I'd say we've got a 45% chance of getting the plans passed on the first application, a 50% chance they'll be rejected and passed under the new rules (potentially with modification), and a 5% chance they won't pass at all.

construction, planning, tyrone, Northern Ireland

In the process of looking for something else, I stumbled across a series of articles on the Blanket about Saor Eire (the 1960s group, not the 1930s group). I'm not sure how I managed to miss them when they first came out, but given my interest in Republican history I was very interested to read them. One thing that was mentioned in Bowyer Bell's The Secret Army that wasn't mentioned in these articles was a splinter group called Saoirse Eire. I don't know if that was a group that really existed or if it was just a couple of guys who gave themselves a name, Peoples Popular Front of Judea-style.

Anyway, the articles are A Little Known Republican Military Group: Saor Eire and three followup articles: Saor Eire, Follow up on Saor Eire, and Saor Eire again.

Saor Eire, IRA, Ireland, communism.

Northern Ireland Where is the bright new future? is an interesting article in a British management magazine called Management Today. The article talks about how the economy of northern Ireland has fallen behind that of the south since the 1970s.

About a third of all the employed people in the six counties work for the government, and government spending accounts for 63% of the gross domestic product. More than 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in the collapse of the shipbuilding and linen industries, and nothing has come along to replace them, while the Celtic Tiger economy in the south has been going gangbusters for 10 years.

The article states that it is logical for the north to try to hitch its wagon to the south and grow economically by integrating its economy and economic policies with that of the south, but political considerations both in northern Ireland and in Great Britain prevent that. In order to attract foreign investment and native startups at the rate they do in the south, the British would have to cut the corporate tax rate from Britain's 30% rate to the south's 12.5% rate. Converting northern Ireland over to the euro would also help level the playing field between the north and the south. But the British won't do either of those for fear of then getting demands for similar treatment from the Scottish and Welsh assemblies and then the uproar that would result in in England.

Additionally even if the British sucked it up and decided to cut the north loose at least economically, the unionist parties' monomania means they would sacrifice their own constituents' prosperity on the altar of the Union. So the north continues to stagnate and I get so bummed out about the picture painted by this article that I wonder if it is such a good idea to move over there after all.

Northern Ireland, Ireland, economy, politics, business, Celtic Tiger

Things are looking promising for a move to the old homestead in Ireland in the spring or summer of 2008. If anybody has any tips to provide or gotchas to watch out for when building a house in the six counties, please feel free to email or comment.

construction, immigration, tyrone

Love Ulster demonstration called off

Both sides got what they wanted -- a riot.