KEVIN MYRES AT LARGE: The Cooley Peninsula is a slice of North Wales stuck at an odd angle on the east coast of Ireland, as if some of the foothills to Snowdonia had been tossed across the sea in some prehistoric fury.
And Omeath, the home of the Sinn Féin candidate, Arthur Morgan, looks more like a fishing village on the shores of Cardigan Bay than one just outside Dundalk. Why, he even has a Welsh name and a Welsh face: you can easily imagine him in a male-voice choir from a place with unpronounceable thickets of "ll" in it.
But it is not Wales, that's for sure: a British army helicopter has been hovering over a body just across the border in Warrenpoint all day, and somewhere in these granite hills the demented lunatics of the "Real IRA" murmur their heathen gibberish.
Arthur Morgan is set to take a seat in Louth, and it's all rather strange. We were told 10 years ago that Sinn Féin-IRA were dead in the peninsula following the abduction, torture and murder of local farmer Tom Oliver. His crime? He had allegedly informed the Garda of an IRA arms dump in the region. In other words, murdered for allegedly doing his civic duty to the State.
As it turned out, this spectacularly evil deed did not prompt a savage crackdown by the State on republican terrorists, nor did it cause enduring loathing of the broader organisation responsible for it. By this weekend, Arthur Morgan is set to become a member of Dáil Éireann. Alleged loyalty to it cost poor Tom Oliver his life.
That's not the only odd thing that's going on in this dislocated part of Wales. The Welshman who is set to become Sinn Féin TD - or should it be Plaid Fein? Sinn Cymru? - is not your usual run of Shinner professional community activist. He is a fish merchant, as indeed are all his family, perhaps, it is said, the best fish merchants in Louth or even beyond, and their "Ocean" freezer vans hurtle around the tiny lanes of the peninsula like heart-transplant ambulances.
Arthur Morgan might know the meaning of fresh fish; his definition of loyalty to his country is far fuzzier. When I asked him recently whether his loyalty was to the Army of the Republic or the Irish Republican army, he promptly started speaking in tongues; or maybe it was Welsh. He babbled the same mumbo-jumbo when challenged by Tom Oliver's son to condemn the murder of his father.
Arthur Morgan is a hardworking, successful businessman. What does he make of the Shinners' 1960s socialist programme of high taxation, high expenditure, which in government would turn the Celtic Tiger into a Celtic sabre-toothed tiger: namely, extinct? Hard to say. One option would be to move his base to the lower-taxation regime over the Border . . .