WHEN STRABANE makes the news, it's seldom for good reasons. The Co Tyrone market town is best known for garnering the kinds of titles that give PR people nightmares. During the Troubles, Strabane was infamous for having the highest unemployment rate in western Europe.
Even today, the town's 5 per cent jobless rate is almost twice the average figure for the North.
More recently, Strabane was twice voted one of the UK's worst places to live in a property poll for Channel 4 television. But after decades spent patching up the damage caused by negative press, Strabane has received extensive praise for an unlikely first. After the opening of the Central Bar earlier this month, the town is now home to the only gay bar in Ireland located outside a city.
On approach, there's little that could be described as revolutionary about the Central Bar. Located on Castle Place - a busy thoroughfare in the centre of the town - the net curtains in the first-floor window and the pebbledash exterior walls aren't typical of the standard gay bar facade. The only hint of a rainbow is in a subtle underlining of the bar's name on a shiny black sign. The Central Bar may be trumpeting the emergence of the northwest's rural gay community, but it's doing so in carefully muffled tones.
Inside the compact premises, assistant manager Sharon McCusker is putting the finishing touches to a blackboard display advertising forthcoming concerts and promotions. Other walls of the bar display information on "gay heritage" and decode gay acronyms such as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) that could be unfamiliar to the uninitiated.
It might smack ever so slightly of Gays for Dummies but given the Central Bar's location, the decor shows this venue is as much a showcase for the gay community in a town with little gay history, as it is a base for local gays and lesbians. "Although people are surprised to hear it, there is definitely a market for a gay bar in Strabane", says manager Betty Fleming. "We also serve Derry and towns like Omagh and Letterkenny which have big gay communities but no gay venues."
Local reaction to the bar has been one of encouragement peppered with curiosity. "It's amazing how many people have come through the door so far," says Ms Fleming. "And a lot of our regulars are not gay". The majority of local politicians have backed the business, with the chairman of Strabane District Council performing the ribbon-cutting duties at the bar's launch night.
"There has been the odd whisper of opposition," says Ms Fleming. "But that's to be expected. Once a place like this opens and becomes established, all that hot air will disappear."
Blackpool-born Stephen Birkett, who has lived in Strabane for 35 years, says the opening of the Central Bar is part of a "sea-change in attitudes" in the town and in the northwest. "When I arrived in Strabane as an English, Protestant gay man in 1973, it didn't go down too well", he says. "But now there are many more open gay people in the area."
Mr Birkett says he experienced regular intimidation in the past that included bricks being thrown through his windows and sustained homophobic taunting. He claims it was the vigilante policing of paramilitary groups that may have put a stop to the attacks on his property. "For a long time, the gay community here was a covert community. But "over the past few years, people have stopped hiding."
Decades spent teaching in the local grammar school meant Mr Birkett saw generations of young people leave the town due to high unemployment and, in some cases, constraining social attitudes. "It sickened me the way people left this place," he says. "Now, more young people seem to be staying in the area or else coming back to the town. It's good to see."
After publishing Ulster Alien in 1999, a novel based on the experiences of a young Protestant gay man in the northwest at the height of the Troubles, Mr Birkett believes attitudes to the gay community have changed so radically in recent years that it's time to write a sequel. "The first novel was all about the religious, social and legal prejudices faced by gay people in Northern Ireland at that time. Today, there's a shift in attitudes and for young people, gay isn't an issue anymore."
Bryan Coll