Singin' in the Buncrana Rain

Singin' in the Buncrana Rain

4 September 2025, Thursday

Being a salty old sea dog (retired) it’s almost impossible for me to enjoy a holiday that doesn’t include a boat trip. So, having lost another breakfast time battle to the leaky teapot, but fortified by ample portions of porridge prepared from Flahavan’s pinhead oatmeal from Supervalu, topped with blackberries freshly picked in the overgrown lane that led to the door of our musty rustic cottage, we jumped into Fionnuala the Fiat and headed off towards the embarkation point for the Lough Swilly Ferry. We knew exactly where we were going because we’d driven past the place on previous days and seen the quay lined with people having their final cigarette before boarding as smoking wasn’t permitted on public transport in Ireland, including the wee roll-on/roll-off car ferries. It was good to know that those dark days of the coughing ships were well and truly behind us.

We drove onto the mighty vessel from the slipway at Rathmullan (Irish: Ráth Maoláin, meaning 'Maoláin's ringfort'). Oooh, that’s us, I thought in a surprised tone of thinking, but before this trip I hadn’t been aware of our family having a ringfort (though there had been the occasional case of ringworm). So the morning’s discovery that the ancient writings and songs passed down from our elders had such a glaring omission brought on an all-day simmering of my wrath. I already knew that Maoláin was the old Irish word for bald. I bear anatomical evidence that I’m a bona fide tribal member in this respect. I was also aware that the first ever written record of a Maoláin dates back to when one of them was thrown out of the court of the first King of Connaught for drinking too much wine, and I’d been very disappointed when my genealogy DNA test had failed to tell me if the wine had been red or white. But I knew nothing about the ring fort. What does a fella do in a ring fort anyway? For the sake of restoring my relaxed holiday frame of mind, I decided to forget all about it until I got home to Malki Chiflik, at which point I would build one of my own in the garden.

Lough Swilly (Irish: Loch Súilí, meaning 'lake of eyes') is a glacial fjord lying between the western side of Inishowen and the eastern side of the Fanad Peninsula. The gorgeousness of our passage across it could only have been improved upon by the appearance of some dolphins or a cup of tea, both of which had been hinted at in the promotional leaflet we found in the musty rustic cottage, but neither of which materialised on the day. However, we enjoyed the crossing and, as we stood in a prominent place on the passenger deck with the wind in our faces and hair, we felt like Kate Winceyette and Leonardo DiCapri-Sun in that Titanic film (Irish: fillum, meaning ‘film’).

But the trouble with dreaming away romantically like that was that it sent Celine Dione’s piercing Titanic theme song flying about in my head, and it hurt like there was a Canada Goose with a tin whistle and a panic attack trapped in it. I was confident that my heart would go on but I couldn’t say with any certainty that my brain would hold out. The only way to remove the woman’s imagined shrieking from those shadowy corners inside my skull was to get hold of my phone and do a bit of research about Inishowen (Irish: Inis Eoghain, meaning 'Island of Eoghan').

People mock the people who seem addicted to looking at a mobile phone all the day, but those crafty little devices can’t be beaten for doing a bit of reading when you’ve nothing else to do and you’re not at home or in a library. Nobody would ever take volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on a bus with them because they’d be so bulky in your pocket you’d never be able to sit down comfortably, and all the other passengers would be staring at the bulge in your trousers. But a phone’s not like that, unless it’s one of the sort our neighbour Maria has that she bought from a stall at the back of the market in 1992.

So I was feeling a bit smug that during the voyage I had learned that the word Eoghan was a male given name that over the course of time, and with a bit of interference from the English, had morphed into Eugene or even Gene, and without it we would never have had the American film star Gene Kelly whose maternal grandfather had been an immigrant from Derry. It all made sense as his song Singin’ in the Rain, that he was famous for all around the world, was surely inspired by him having to make the crossing over from Rathmullan one wet morning on the Lough Swilly Ferry.

At the time of our trip, Inishowen was a peninsula, but just after the last Ice Age it had been an island. It must have been all those long dry scorching-hot Irish summers that caused the evaporation of the sea that had been separating it from the mainland. Its south-eastern corner lay in County Derry in Ireland’s British-occupied zone, having been transferred from County Donegal at the insistence of the Irish Society (a consortium of livery companies) as part of the Plantation of Ulster (i.e. the organised colonisation) in the seventeenth century. But why were livery companies so named? Were they a bit like liver?

I thought it strange that the British wanted that small segment of Ireland way back then but they didn’t want it to be in Donegal. This was three hundred years before the partition of the country so, without the existence of a border, I couldn’t see what difference it made. Similar dodgy dealings went on, apparently, when partition came in 1922 to create two self-governing territories on the island of Ireland but still within the United Kingdom, they being the Irish Free State (which was declared an independent republic in 1949) and Northern Ireland. The idea was that the predominantly Loyalist province of Ulster would become Northern Ireland and the other three provinces would form the Irish Free State. But in two of Ulster’s counties (Cavan and Monaghan) the majority of the population was Nationalist so they stayed on the Free State side of the newly installed border. Donegal, also in Ulster, had a predominantly Unionist population but the British were worried that due to its remote geographical location it would be too difficult to control its political dissidents who were forever getting up to no good, so they added that one to the Free State too. The end result was that the nine counties of Ulster were whittled down to the six counties of Northern Ireland (Antrim, Down, Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Derry). Perhaps I should add that neither side really wanted County Cavan because its people had a reputation for being tight with their money.

Well that’s a very simplistic way of describing how Ireland became A Nation Once Again, as the old song goes, but I’ve missed out all the bits about their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns because to explain all the complexities of that would take almost as long as it took to get the British to leave. But that’s how it was told to me by my politically broadminded Irish Nationalist County Antrim father.

One of the really strange things about the outcome of the division of our country is that the Orange Order have more of their lodges in Donegal (in the Republic) than they do in Derry (in the North). They’re the lads that march about the place with big drums, colourful sashes and tatty bowler hats, and who light massive bonfires bedecked with old car tyres, and sectarian and racist flags and slogans every July. Though I’ve got to hand it to the Donegal Orangemen, they have respect for their neighbours so their rituals are carried out in a far less provocative way than they are north of the border. Furthermore, during our stay in Donegal I was surprised to see that Presbyterian churches outnumbered Catholic ones, at least in the top half of the county. Donegal’s a living example of how people from both sides of the religious and cultural divide can live together peacefully.

Generally speaking, Irish people in the North and the South seem to be getting on a lot better these days, but unfortunately there’s a growing proportion of them that have united in their gripe over people arriving there from places like Romania and Bulgaria. If they’d had any notion of my history I could have been very unpopular with some of them, possibly even more so than when I lived in the North at the time when the Troubles were just kicking off. That’s why it’s handy to have a good stout shillelagh about yourself.

So after thirty minutes on the wild raging sea we disembarked in Buncrana (Irish: Bun Cranncha, meaning 'foot of the River Crana'). It was my first visit to the town since the days when I lived in County Antrim and we’d sometimes go there as a family on a Sunday drive in my Da’s work’s van. How it had changed in that time. The whitewashed thatched cottages and the real live donkeys had given way to a Supervalu supermarket, but it was still raining and Gene Kelly had passed away, probably from pneumonia.

Something else I remembered about the Buncrana of sixty years prior was that it had been a great place for playing bingo in a tent. County Antrim where we lived was on the north side of a border that had been a very hard border with British Army roadblocks and military vehicles until the Good Friday people came along in 1998 and gave us a nice new soft border. The Ulster Unionist Government of the North of Ireland, guided by the big guns from the Presbyterian Church and Church of Ireland, decreed that people enjoying themselves on a Sunday should be outlawed. Newsagents could trade for a couple of hours in the morning of the Sabbath but all other shops, together with public houses, restaurants, cafés, cinemas and petrol stations were prohibited from opening for the whole day. Even the kids’ swings in the parks were chained and padlocked so that we couldn’t play on them. Had it not been for the perpetual sideways rain and the smell of the Guinness from the illegally open back doors of the pubs, we might have thought we were living in Saudi Arabia. However, in the town of Buncrana in nearby Éire, the sinful Catholics were having bingo sessions in a marquee set up in a field every Sunday afternoon. Sinful Protestants, if you can believe that such a thing ever existed, caught on to this and arranged convoys of buses to make the 160 kilometre round trip to join in with the sinfulness at the other side of the divide. In those terrible times of sectarian hatred, bingo was one of the few things that brought the two communities together. Obviously but unfortunately, the cash prizes were paid out in Irish punts so any winners from the North could only spend their winnings by returning the following week for more bingo. Apparently they could also raise a few extra punts by means of the black market trade in contraceptives that were banned in the Catholic Republican South but were perfectly legal in the North where the last thing they wanted was more little Catholics.    

Back to September 2025, and a ten-minute-drive northwards from Buncrana took us to a place where the sun shone, the puddles were beginning to dry up and the teapots didn’t leak. Fort Dunree, located on a rocky headland, was originally built as one of a series of fortifications to defend Lough Swilly during the Napoleonic Wars. In recent years it had been made into a military museum and, as well as the really old stuff, it had great big guns from World War One housed in concrete bunkers. From its lovely café it was sometimes possible to see dolphins at play, but not while we were there… obviously. But we could see that it faced a similar construction called Knockalla Fort (now a private residence) on the other side of the lough, not very far from our musty rustic cottage.

At the head of Mamore Gap in the Urris Hills we paused to look at Saint Éigneach's Well.  This lovely spot had been semi-anglicised as Columbkille's Well and then further anglicised as St Columba’s Well, even though he wasn’t at all well and had in fact been dead since 597 CE. It was so-called because it was a well where, according to tradition, the local Saint Éigneach meditated. The site, which had been a place for visiting pilgrims for centuries, had a replica of the Lourdes Grotto and at least half a dozen statues of the Virgin Mary. The view from there across the glen and green pasture to Leenankeel Bay made it, for me, one of those places so wonderfully serene that it left a lump in my throat the size of a Supervalu scone. Saint Éigneach certainly knew what he was doing in digging his well in this place of such outstanding beauty. During a couple of minutes of sombre reflection my thoughts were with Fathers Ted Crilly and Jack Hackett, both of whom had influenced my views on religion and both of whom were sadly deceased.

Amusement compensated for disappointment at the Doagh Famine Village on the sandy shore of Trawbreaga Bay. We were sure that the area really had been struck by starvation and horror during the 1840s as well as abject poverty over many decades either side of an Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger), but this much publicised attraction amounted to a couple of rows of tarted up old dwellings filled with the sort of antiques and bric-a-brac that enabled us to see what televisions, typewriters, Coca Cola bottles and even perfectly functioning teapots they would have had in a typical bog cabin during the Famine. I’d visited many famine burial grounds, abandoned settlements and memorial sites in the past and they had all left me with deep feelings of sadness mixed with anger, but this place didn’t. It was more like a Disney Famine Attraction for tourists. There was absolutely no mention of why an Gorta Mór had come about and little regard paid to the million wretched souls who had been starved to death in Ireland’s holocaust, or to the millions more who had suffered extreme poverty, disease and displacement. And there was something sadly ironic about the fact that the price of admission included a free piece of cake washed down by a cup of tea in the visitor centre.  

Just a few kilometres up the road from Doagh, Malin Head (Irish: Cionn Mhálanna, meaning ‘the headland of the brae-face or of the hill-brow’) is the northernmost tip of Ireland. At this point we were even further north than those bingo-worshipping Irish people living over at the other side of Lough Foyle in Northern Ireland (Ulster-Scots: Nrn Irn, meaning ‘Northern Ireland’).

It was there that we saw what is the best example of the word Éire spelt out on the ground in large white-painted rocks. They had been positioned there during World War Two so that allied air crews would be aware that they were entering neutral airspace. I used to know a lovely old man called Fred Parmenter who lived in a Wiltshire village and who told me that during the war he had been an R.A.F. pilot stationed at an airbase on the shore of Lough Erne in County Fermanagh in the North of Ireland. He said that his squadron flew out on missions in Sunderland flying boats daily, and almost round the clock, crossing County Donegal in Éire to reach the Atlantic to bomb the German U-boats that lurked beneath the waves like the deadliest of sharks (even though the sharks in Irish waters are nice). Adolf Hitler got word of this and wasn’t altogether happy, so in 1941 the Luftwaffe carried out three bombing raids on Dublin just to remind the Irish Government about neutrality.

I’d always known that at Malin Head nature could often be found at it fiercest and most awe-inspiring. There’d always be a powerful wind, powerful views and a powerful feeling of being in a very special place. It’s a grand spot for the ornithology and for falling off cliffs into violently surging seas. We were so overcome by the rugged beauty of it all that we stayed an extra couple of hours and in doing so we missed the return ferry across to Rathmullan. Instead we took the long way home, entirely by road, which was very nice but a long way nevertheless. Much of the way today had been along previously unexplored sections of the Wild Atlantic Way, including that last bit that we otherwise would have missed.

In the Pier Bar in Portsalon there was a Dublin man, a Donegal man, and a Cavan man, each enjoying a pint of Guinness. A fly came in through the window and landed in the Dublin man’s pint, so the Dublin man complained to the barman and demanded that a fresh pint be poured. The fly then landed in the Donegal man’s pint but the Donegal man just flicked it out with his finger and carried on drinking. When the fly landed in the Cavan man’s pint he grabbed the poor insect by the throat and shouted ‘Spit it out! Spit it out!’

Image:

The intrepid Lough Swilly Ferry.

Part Five:

The Concept of Rain at a Jaunty Angle

Click on the link to read.

Photographs:

The Donegal Dally