Ireland's problems are deepest on the Border

WALKING THE BORDER:The death of a young soldier led EDWARD BURKEto walk the Border. Here, he reflects on his recently completed journey

THE FINAL DAYS of my walk were very different to the beginning. In Donegal, I spent long hours walking through mountains, forests and bogland, lingering over sparing encounters with the people who lived and worked there. Towards Newry I basked in the hospitality of the Turkington family, and their Corvan relations.

I was also joined by my friends Anthony and Annaïck, who came up from Dublin to ease the weight of my pack and the length of the horizon. The busy towns and fields of Armagh banished any feeling of solitude.

When I crossed back into Monaghan and visited the village of Glaslough and Castle Leslie, noisy Range Rovers and a Jaguar roared up the drive for the next wedding. I found a quiet corner in the courtyard café where I was joined by Jack Leslie, fourth baronet and 95 years old, with a twinkle in his eye brighter than his amethyst ring. Leslie was anxious to know whether I had seen the best of the estate and the surrounding countryside.

Walking through south Armagh, I met the same courtesy and helpfulness that has marked my walk along the Border. One local man told me that Crossmaglen was “just a normal town with a square”, a statement that perhaps outdoes grand speeches on how much the peace process has changed Ireland for the better. But Crossmaglen appears proud of its Republican past. I walked by a large “IRA” notice pinned to a pole on the Newry road, beside a neat house and garden with a statue of a sitting Buddha.

Three weeks after I left the Donegal coast I caught my first glimpse of the Irish Sea on the afternoon of July 29th. I climbed over the Fews Mountains and Slieve Gullion, past the ancient Dorsey and Dane Cast ramparts built by the men of Ulster two millennia ago.

As the plains of Louth and Meath and the sea beyond came into view, a squall of rain whirled in from the east, drawing a hazy curtain on the south. I walked on to Newry and the end of my trek along the Border.

Ivor Turkington was there to meet me at the edge of Newry. It is now more than two years since Ivor and his wife Marie lost their son Neal, a lieutenant in the Royal Gurkha Rifles who was shot dead by an Afghan soldier who turned on his British Army advisers. My Border walk has been in support of the Neal Turkington Nepal Project.

I did not know Neal but I was in Kabul working as an analyst with the EU Police Mission in Afghanistan at the time of his death. I read about Neal’s funeral and was amazed that his family and friends, instead of withdrawing to grieve quietly, threw themselves into a fundraising effort to build schools in Neal’s beloved Nepal.

Any person living in Northern Ireland has to deal with a number of contradictions and degrees of cultural separation. Some people choose to be defined by that which separates them, others by what unites.

Neal Turkington grew up in Portadown where the importance of boundaries between distinct communities was sharply in evidence during the standoff over the marching route of the Protestant Orange Order through the Catholic residential area of the Garvaghy Road in the late-1990s.

Reading Neal’s own writing and talking to his family and friends gave me an insight into a young man who refused to be defined by straight lines. On long marches in Nepal and Borneo, or fighting in the brutal heat of a summer in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, Neal comes across as an original thinker, remembered by his peers as endearingly stubborn, or a typically Irish “contrarian”. He was determined to see the other side – to empathise and understand. Neal read voraciously about the history of Ireland and Afghanistan. As an aid worker and a soldier he travelled to the most dangerous, poorest parts of the world including El Salvador and Afghanistan.

Neal was as proud to be an Irishman as he was to be a Gurkha officer. Whereas some officers in the British Army still take comfort in what they see as the natural order of things – namely that class is inevitable and lines should be respected – Neal’s Gurkha soldiers remember how he constantly encouraged them to improve their education and were delighted to be invited to visit their platoon leader’s home in Northern Ireland.

One of these soldiers wrote to Neal’s family: “We will always walk in the path and follow the principles and standards he set so that if he is watching us from heaven he’ll be proud of us and tell others ‘that’s my platoon’.”

The Turkingtons and the Corvans are the type of people that are often forgotten when the outside world talks about Northern Ireland. They are the quiet, decent centre who rarely made the news over 30 years of violence. I met many like them along the Border. These people could not do enough for me; they invited me into their houses, fed, watered me and showed me the natural and cultural riches of their region.

I was greatly impressed by the understated devotion of the curator of the Armagh public library. During the Troubles, she worried that the 18th century building and its priceless books would be burned down. She repeatedly praised the gardaí who had recovered the stolen first edition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, on which Swift had made hand-written amendments for later editions. She spoke little of her ordeal of being threatened and tied up by the armed gang who stole the book. But she was very proud that Armagh was back on its feet.

This new tranquillity should not be overstated. People seemed greatly relieved that the years of terror are over but they are also aware that challenges must still be overcome to secure the peace. Economic and social problems in Ireland are often at their deepest along the Border.

The gentle politeness of people in Donegal can be clouded by flashes of anger when they speak of services cut by the government, or the number of people forced to emigrate due to the lack of jobs in their local area.

On the night I arrived in Derry, I learned that thousands of houses were without power because of an arson attack by young people on an electricity sub-station in the city. A garda told me that acts of vandalism along the Donegal side of the Border have also increased, particularly on churches and schools.

Many people in Cavan, Fermanagh and Monaghan are furious that there have been layoffs at companies once owned by the Quinn group. In north Leitrim, people feel powerless to stop proposals to extract gas from the local area by the controversial method of fracking.

After eight years working abroad, the death of a young soldier in Afghanistan brought me to the north of Ireland. To honour his memory I have tried to approach my journey with an open mind, acknowledging a boundary but not being defined by it.

Donations can be made to the Neal Turkington Nepal Project at justgiving.com/Edward-Burke0