Whisper it softly, but traders in the south Monaghan town of Carrickmacross are doing better than ever in the midst of the foot-and-mouth crisis.
Seven miles from south Armagh and even closer to Louth, Carrick's proximity to the problem areas is confirmed by Garda checkpoints on its approach roads. And precisely because of those checkpoints, the local supermarkets are thriving.
"It's been as good as Christmas," says Gus O'Gorman, owner of the Super Valu store on Main Street. "Better than Christmas," says Robert McElwaine of nearby Londis.
Indeed, the first Friday of the crisis was like December 24th in both stores. In his two years in the shop that was Mr McElwaine's biggest weekend. But even as the urgency subsided, business has stayed buoyant and staff are working flat out to meet demand.
The reason for the upturn is that Dundalk has been temporarily cut off. Traditionally, many in Carrick have forsaken their crowded local town when it comes to the major weekly shopping, and instead risked 14 miles of notoriously bad road for the bigger stores, freer parking and what Mr O'Gorman calls the "comfort shopping" of Dundalk.
For now, at least, restrictions on the movement of food out of Louth have stopped the migration. There are other reasons Carrick has escaped the worst. The area's charms are too subtle for tourism, so there was little to lose in this sector.
And unlike Ballybay and other neighbouring towns, Carrick has not even suffered from the moratorium on livestock marts. The local Gunnes-owned sales yard, which buttressed Main Street for half a century, had already closed last August: a victim not of poor business - it was thriving to the end - but of its high-value location in the middle of town.
Mr O'Gorman bought the site, for a price neither side chooses to divulge, but he puts an overall price tag of £9 million to £10 million on his plans for the location: 100,000 sq ft of comfort shopping and underground parking. A challenge to Dundalk even if, as local retailers hope will not happen post-crisis, shoppers resume their trips there.
There have been other spin-offs too. With up to 50 extra gardai drafted in to support the local station's efforts, Carrick has become one of the garrison towns in the effort to seal the borders with Louth and Armagh.
On top of this, the task of disinfection at the Border crossings has become a minor industry, with one Monaghan agency employing 84 people to spray vehicles around the clock. Damp and dull work it may be but, at almost £100 for a 12-hour shift, it has its rewards. As it needs to.
In industry-rich Carrickmacross, the shortage of labour is such that one local plant now has 100 Latvian workers on the staff, almost 15 per cent of the total.
Some Romanian asylum-seekers have been among those drafted in to spray vehicles in the all-hands-to-the-pump operation.
Nobody in Carrick is rejoicing at the misfortune of Louth or Armagh. An ill wind could literally blow the foot-and-mouth virus into Monaghan and, even as it is, local farmers are suffering the same deprivations as elsewhere.
Besides, not all businesses in the town are thriving. Jimmy McMahon, whose Carrick Sports is also on Main Street, has seen turnover fall by about a third so far. One of the few local shops to benefit from tourism, half his summer trade is in supplying English fishermen, many of whom are already cancelling orders.
It was worse during the suspension of football games. "That was a pure disaster," he says. But at least the football gear is crossing the counter again.
And then there is the issue of Nuremore Hotel. This four-star establishment on the edge of the town was put on the map by Jack Charlton and his Republic of Ireland soccer team, when they used it as an out-of-Dublin base in the heady days of the early 1990s.
Boasting as it did the essential elements of fishing, golf and relative proximity to the city, Carrick was an ideal base for the team. At least until the crowds of 2,500 turning up to watch training sessions at the tiny local soccer pitch caused a traffic hazard and forced the training sessions to take the same road as the weekend shoppers, to Dundalk.
The Nuremore has invested hugely in recent years, attracting conference business in particular. Management declines to speak about the current situation, but the hotel has certainly been hard hit by cancellations.
An indirect reflection of Nuremore's problems is blank pages in the guest book of Breffni House, Carrick's only guesthouse. There have been few full houses lately, and hopes that the migrant gardai might fill the gap have proved unfounded.
The cost-conscious officers have been staying in the cheaper B&Bs, apparently, or sharing houses.