President Clinton's visit to Dundalk on a damp evening last week brought memories flooding back of life in a Border town before the peace process.
Almost exactly 25 year ago I was standing just yards from the spot where the presidential platform was erected when a bomb exploded. On a Friday evening less than a week before Christmas I met my mother after work in the local newspaper, the Dundalk Democrat, where I had started a few months previously.
We were walking along Earl Street and had stopped to look in the window of a hardware store, R.Q. O'Neill's, brightly decorated for Christmas. The street was quiet and damp after recent rainfall. There was a powerful blast and a shock wave that threw us both off balance. Shards of glass began to fall out of windows all around us in what seemed like slow motion.
We retreated uninjured to the Democrat offices and as far away as possible from the bomb that had exploded in a car outside Kay's Tavern in Crowe Street, where we would have walked had we not lingered for few minutes outside to window shop.
The loyalist bomb blast killed a council workman, Jack Rooney, who was about to cycle home. A customer in Kay's Tavern, Hugh Watters, a local tailor, was caught in the smoke and flames which engulfed the building. We watched from an upstairs window of the newspaper offices as flames lit up the sky and beer kegs exploded.
President Clinton told the crowd that the people of Dundalk know what it is like to face fear and isolation. He was right. Over the years there had been what could be described colloquially as "a lot of rootin', bootin' and shootin'."
Dundalk was El Paso from the UK. Locals and business people in the town were incandescent with anger and the sobriquet still rankles.
In the late 1960s Dundalk was a refuge for families burned out of their homes during pogroms in Belfast and other towns in the North. Some returned home, others settled down to live and work in the area.
A few used Dundalk as a bolthole, a place to lie low when the going got tough. Throughout the Troubles the gardai and the Army's 27th Infantry Battalion held the IRA in check. We became familiar with the joint Garda/Army patrols heading for the Border.
Republican sympathisers ran riot one infamous night in 1972 and laid siege to the Garda station, manned by only a few officers. One of them fired a volley of shots over the heads of the rioters, who were trying to set fire to the imposing granite building. Soldiers arrived - drumming on their shields and firing CS gas. I got a whiff too but not enough to stop me watching the baton charges - one led by a garda wielding a hurley stick.
As a teenager I was perhaps exposed to more real life than most, being the son of a local photographer. There were many incidents to record, gun battles and bomb attacks along the Border that resulted in death and misery for scores of people. These served to blacken the reputation of the area but many local people - politicians, church leaders and individuals - stood up to be counted.
As Bill Clinton said, it's a new day in Dundalk and a new day in Ireland: "It was great to be in the home town of the Corrs - I feel at home here."
What Dundalk people witnessed as the Clinton roadshow was wound up had all the qualities of a movie that left onlookers dazed.
Even the Secret Service melted when one officer saw a small girl trying to get over a railing - "let that little girl through, please", he said, as he hauled her over.
This town was once devastated by job losses. The closure of shoe factories and engineering works left the town struggling for years. But now Dundalk is enjoying a reversal of fortunes. Employers such as Rank Zerox and Heinz are helping to ensure a brighter future.
The Border economy is one of ebb and flow. Five years ago motorists went North to fill their tanks, now it's the other way around. In the 1970s a petrol trader was asked how he ensured the huge amounts of cash in his till didn't go astray. He produced a handgun from his pocket and said "that's how".
Yes, the Border is different now.
Conor Kavanagh works in public relations