The stench of tear-gas from the North reached through the radio news to us during that warm and sensuous summer 30 years ago.

Carrol O'Daly and I were preparing for our finals at UCD: but these appeared increasingly irrelevant as the violent events in Derry dwarfed all else on the island. Our view was simple and simplistic: civil rights good, RUC bad, so when Bernadette Devlin appealed for people to go North to help out we decided we must go.

We hitched to Newry which we walked through; beyond it, lining the hill on the Banbridge Road outside the town that August evening stood an entire army of B Specials, unspeaking, waiting like dark invaders.

Black coats, black hats, black trousers, just black black black as we passed them, half-expecting to be stopped, hauled off into a ditch, beaten, shot. Those were our thoughts, however absurd, as we walked that silent gauntlet, hearing the odd clink of a Lee Enfield or a Sterling sub-machinegun.

On reflection now, I'm sure they were just country boys, as frightened of entering nationalist Newry as we were of them. A fear held in common and never a word said.

Even as Northern Ireland slipped into civil war, its instinctual hospitality was irrepressible and hitching lifts proved easy. The last driver dropped us on the Falls. There we were, two ridiculous figures looking for some headquarters to report to, even as people with closed, set faces hurried homewards, the air electric with terror.

We asked a man where two volunteers from Dublin should go.

"Home," he said. "Dublin. Get out of here. The guns are coming out the night and there's nothing youse can do, unless you've got some guns. Have youse uns got some guns, aye? No? Youse are childer. Wee childer. Get you on on out of here while youse still can. Belfast isn't Derry. We do it with guns here, so we do."

We stopped a young man wearing a Connolly Youth badge to offer him our services; at this point we were so desperate to be of help that we would have taken orders from a babe in pram, provided the babe was a Northern Catholic.

His message was the same. Tonight the RUC would be met with gunfire. Were we any use with guns? Machinegun fire could already be heard from somewhere. Smoke was beginning to rise from distant burning streets. The more congenial, mannerly warfare of Derry beckoned.

We went to Great Victoria Street station, but all trains to Derry had been cancelled. The last train leaving before Belfast closed down for war was to Ballymena. Was that, we asked the ticket-seller, on the way to Derry? (That's how much we knew about Northern Ireland).

She was suspicious: why did we want to go to Derry? But the last train was leaving, she wanted to get home, and so we got our tickets to Ballymena. From there, with night falling, quite alone and ill with terror and ignorance, guided by a signpost pointing to Londond'y, we started down an empty country road.

B Specials' tenders rumbled through the dark; at their noisy approach, we hid behind hedges. When we heard a different engine noise, we emerged from our hiding place. A baker's van. We waved a thumb at it and the driver, amazingly, stopped.

"Boys a boys, such a night to be out," he said heartily. "Where are youse going the night, boys?"

"Derry," we said.

"Londonderry, aye? Hop in boys, hop in."

It was midnight, the North was falling apart, and this cheery, fat, bald, middle-aged unionist baker was giving lifts to complete strangers on their way to add to his province's troubles.

It grew more bizarre. There were Specials' roadblocks ahead, he said: we should hide amid his buns and baps in the back. "And boys, help yisselves to the food," he chortled merrily. "Lads like you always hungry."

Famished, we obeyed him as he prattled about his business, twice a week over to the Mull of Kintyre to sell his bread. His economic community was that of Dalriada: it was a world, a culture, of which I knew nothing, yet there I was, ready to turn it upside down. "What about you, Mervyn, Neville, Cecil?" came the cheery greetings at the roadblocks, while in the back two would-be fenians scoffed his buns.

He took us home and gave us tea, then we continued our journey, walking through a completely lightless night, the sound of police tenders growling through the dark. Finally, after much terrified wandering, a statue of the Virgin Mary in a window told us we were in nationalist territory. We tapped on the door. It was two in the morning, and more pathological hospitality awaited us.

"Come in boys, come in! What about ye! On the way to Derry, aye? You'd better stay the night here! You must be starving. Will ham do? Wild bad it is in Belfast, wild bad, a dozen dead. Two dozen, three dozen. Armagh the same. Specials everywhere. Towns and villages burning all over the place. More tea? Have another sandwich, go on . . ."

Finally, a couple of hours' sleep, sort of, on the carpet.

Morning, and our next lift was from a Catholic RUC man who had been injured early in the riots in Derry. Bernadette Devlin was a communist, he assured us. It was well known: Moscow-trained. We listened to this idiot in silence. How sweet that we should be in his car, effectively, at her command.

The British army had deployed in Derry overnight and the RUC was off the streets. Craigavon Bridge was held by the Prince of Wales Regiment, baffled Yorkshiremen in a strange city about a strange duty and the heroes of the hour to the Bogsiders. Tea at street corners. Officers looking at maps and scratching their heads, coils of barbed wire everywhere.

So, we had missed the fighting in Derry. Peace of an exhausted, burnt-out variety had arrived in its place. Wood smoke drifted through a rubble-strewn Castle Street; the smell of smouldering rubber filled the air.

Exhausted, we dozed on a grassy knoll by Rossville flats till a boy came up to us. His Ma had seen us from the tower-block. Were we hungry? He led us up many flights of stairs to his home, his mother welcoming us like family. "You must be exhausted; sit ye down there while I get ye something to eat."

She fed us doorstep-sized Spam sandwiches and Heinz tomato soup. Later I saw inside her kitchen cupboard. It was completely empty.

The son, aged about 12, then took us to the roof to show us a huge rubber catapult used to shower munitions on the RUC: petrol-bombs and strange incendiary devices made by soaking balls of newspaper in fertiliser and then drying them out in the Rossville boiler-room, to be ignited just before being launched. Greek fire, first used to defend Constantinople, reinvented in the Bogside, 1969.

He spoke with voluble knowledge about discrimination, gerrymandering, the B Specials, cheerfully, intelligently. But now, he said, the British army was on the streets. The Bogsiders had beaten the RUC and the troubles were over now. We agreed with him.

That evening we caught the bus back to Dublin. The troubles were finished and we had missed them. So now, in 1999, only one question remains: dear God, what fates awaited those good people we met those two days and a single night once upon a time 30 years ago?