In the Rain and Sun of Donegal: A Model for Unity?

Is it totally fanciful to imagine that Donegal might serve as a model for a harmonious united Ireland? I have just returned after a week’s cycling in that beautiful northernmost county, where this unlikely notion was among my passing thoughts as I rode through interminable rain showers and occasional glimpses of sun across its high bogs and mountain passes, past its mighty cliffs and gorgeous beaches.

Donegal has a bit of everything from all parts of these islands. We stayed a night in Malin village, on the road to Malin Head, and were struck by its English-style village green and cosy, encircling cottages, built in the mid-18th century by George Harvey, a Plantation landlord who owned a large estate of 10,000 acres.

The Scottish influence is very ancient. As early as the 6th century, St Colmcille founded a famous monastery on the island of Iona. When the O’Donnell chiefs ruled Donegal in the four centuries before the Flight of the Earls, their military might was based on ‘gallowglasses’, mercenary soldiers from the Scottish islands. With the establishment of cheap steamboat services to Scotland in the early 19th century, up to 25,000 men and women from the county’s poorer areas were travelling every year to the work as farm labourers, most of them in the Scottish lowlands, well into the 20th century. The musical and cultural links are still there, and a form of Ulster-Scots is still spoken in the Laggan district of east Donegal.

And of course Donegal is the most Irish of counties. In the 2022 census, nearly 60,000 people said they could speak Irish (up almost 2,400 on the 2012 census), although only 11,600 (20%) said they could speak it very well and nearly 19,000 (32%) said they could speak it well. The county contains numerous Gaeltacht areas, including Gweedore, the Rosses, Cloughaneely, Glencolmcille and surroundings, and the islands of Arranmore, Tory and Inishbofin. It is also rich in music, theatre and storytelling, with internationally celebrated playwrights like Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness, fiddlers like Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh (also a singer) and Tommy Peoples, the singers Enya and Daniel O’Donnell, the guitarist Rory Gallagher, and bands like Clannad and Altan.

Although 77% of the population in the 1992 census identified as Catholic, there are also small but active Church of Ireland and Presbyterian congregations scattered throughout the county. As somebody from a Presbyterian background, I was intrigued to see a small whitewashed Presbyterian church on the road to Malin Head, making it the northernmost Presbyterian church in Ireland. The Presbyterian Church in Donegal town is clearly a lively and outward looking congregation, with links to church initiatives in Liberia, Senegal and Uganda and the usual wide range of Presbyterian activities, from bowls to bible study, hospital visits to Boys Brigade.

Then there is the annual Orange Order march at Rossnowlagh, near Bundoran, which takes place a week before the ‘Twelfth’ in Northern Ireland, and is attended by thousands of Orangemen and women from Donegal, Cavan, Leitrim, Monaghan and the North. It is the largest Orange march in the Republic and in recent decades has been an unthreatening and friendly occasion with intrigued Catholic locals among the spectators (although it was suspended for eight years during the worst of the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s). There are also marches in Raphoe, Manorcunningham, Newtowncunningham and St Johnston in east Donegal.

In that area there is a large Protestant enclave, and the culture of Orange halls, pipe bands and highland dancing classes reflects this. In the early 1970s there were sectarian incidents and threats against local Protestants, arson attacks against Orange Halls and even two nights of rioting in St Johnston in July 1972. But since the end of the ‘Troubles’ relations between the religious communities here have been generally relaxed and cordial. We are very far from the 1934 petition in this area, in which nearly 7,400 Protestants called for it to be incorporated into Northern Ireland. Most people here, and particularly younger people, are happy to be citizens of the newly liberal and prosperous Republic of Ireland (even if quite a lot of them still support the Northern Ireland football team!).

Every October there is a festival in Ballybofey and Stranorlar to celebrate Frances Browne, the largely forgotten 19th century blind poet and novelist from Stranorlar, best known for her collection of children’s stories, Granny’s Wonderful Chair. It is unique in that it features writers in Irish, English and Ulster-Scots, all three languages still spoken in the Finn Valley in east Donegal.

I don’t want to be accused of being a ‘Pollyanna’. The county returns two Sinn Féin TDs to Dáil Eireann. I know that there are many unreconstructed republicans who are proud of having sheltered ‘on the run’ IRA volunteers. During the ‘Troubles’ IRA men lived undisturbed by the Irish authorities in caravans in Lifford and ventured across the border to bomb and kill. On the other hand, I know of DUP politicians who happily spend their holidays in Donegal, with friends and relatives who are about as far from those republicans as one can get. Then there are the peacemakers: the late Fine Gael TD Paddy Harte from Raphoe was one, joining with the late Derry UDA leader Glen Barr to set up the Messines Peace Park in Belgium to remember the soldiers of the 16th Irish Division and 36th Ulster Division who fought and died side by side in the First World War.

There are darker sides of relations between settler and native in Donegal, as elsewhere. One of the highlights of my cycle trip was a visit to Glenveagh Castle and National Park, on a particularly rain-sodden day. This is a wondrous, hidden, mountainy place. The castle, built by Captain John George Adair, a Scots-Irish businessman from County Laois, between 1867 and 1873, and inhabited by its last American owner, Henry McIlhenny until the early 1980s, is beautifully maintained, giving a real glimpse of how the other 0.1% of the population lived in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The visitor centre, with its splendid café, is a model of its kind and a real refuge on a torrential day; the nice ladies at the reception desk even allowed me and my cycling companion, David Ward, to dry our soaking clothes in a back room.

‘Black Jack’ Adair was one of Ireland’s most notorious 19th century landlords. He had made his fortune buying up estates bankrupt after the great Irish Famine. He purchased Glenveagh and neighbouring Gartan (where Colmcille was born) in 1859, amassing an estate of 28,000 acres. Rows with his tenants over shooting rights and trespassing sheep led to the murder of his Scottish steward in 1861. On 3 April of that year Adair, helped by a large force of RIC constables, evicted 44 families, comprising 244 men, women and children, leaving them to wander the roads, to seek shelter in Letterkenny workhouse or eventually – for some of the younger ones – to emigrate to Australia. These were the infamous Derryveagh evictions. As a result of them, he cleared 11,600 acres of mountainous land adjacent to what is now Glenveagh National Park. Some claimed the evictions were part of Adair’s cruel effort to beautify the land around the castle and improve its view. His ambition was to create an estate and castle that surpassed Balmoral, Queen Victoria’s Scottish retreat.

Despite being a genuinely bad man, Adair prospered. He moved to New York where he set up a brokerage firm to place British loans in America at higher interest rates than those in Britain. In 1869 he married a wealthy American heiress and eight years later established the first cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle (the ‘sticking up’ bit in the far north of that state) in Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the USA, which had been cleared a few years earlier of the Commanche native people. He died in 1885, aged 62.

Further south, I took a short detour to Glenties to hear my daughter Sorcha, the Irish Times journalist, chair a session at the McGill summer school on ‘Fractured Communities’, featuring a sometimes fiery debate between two strong and articulate women, the Indian-Northern Irish broadcaster and performer Lata Sharma and the SDLP leader Claire Hannah.

However Donegal doesn’t strike me as a fractured community, unlike Northern Ireland. In the last century Catholics and Protestants might have lived largely parallel lives. Today people may worship in different churches (the not insignificant number who still worship). But they get on, they are good neighbours, even friends – I believe that is as much as we can ever hope for if and when this island is ever re-united in some form. And good neighbourliness is not a bad outcome to aim for in this imperfect world. Paddy Harte Jr, the former chair of the International Fund for Ireland, says: “Donegal’s geo-political position, with 93% of its land border shared with Northern Ireland, meant that people inevitably felt a responsibility to learn to live together – a measure of this is how they successfully navigated the tensions brought about by the NI ‘Troubles.”

Seamus Mallon always used to long for ‘a shared home place’ (the title of the memoir I helped him write) in Northern Ireland. Maybe that is what Donegal has now become. Donegal Protestants and Catholics will be shouting together for Michael Murphy and the Donegal football team when they face Kerry in the all-Ireland final at Croke Park this weekend. Just as they shouted together for Burtonport-born Packie Bonner when his save put the Republic of Ireland through to the quarter finals of the World Cup in Italy 35 years ago. Sport uniting people in their shared home place: that should be happiness and togetherness enough for the moment.