The area of administration was constituted by taking a large market town as a nucleus and attaching to it the surrounding rural district with an approximate radius of ten miles. Since such had been the rationale behind the establishment of market towns here following the Plantation, it resulted in a much more stable and homogonous Union than the average Poor Law Union over England and Wales. Indeed our local government ever since has been based on similar regions.
Newry Union was one of the most populous. It stretched from Rathfriland to Jonesborough to Mountnorris. It ranked as thirty fourth in Ireland and was declared on May 3 1839. It encompassed an area of 138,000 acres which in 1831 had a population of 88,181 (incidentally close to today’s population of Newry & Mourne District Council). Its electoral divisions then, with their respective populations were:
In County Down : – Newry, 10,004: Ouley 2,974: Crobane 3,601: Donaghmore 2,378: Glen 2,985: Warrenpoint 4,125: Upper Clonallan 4,053: Rathfriland 4,419: Drumgath 2,683: Hilltown 2,457: and Clonduff 3,320.
The number of ex-officio guardians was ten, and of elected guardians thirty one. Of these, four were elected by the division of Newry, two each by Ballybot, Warrenpoint, Rathfriland, Poyntzpass and Camlough, and one each by the other divisions. Ballybot division was in the borough of Newry and the baronies of Upper and Lower Orior.
The number of tenements valued for poor law rates was as follows: in the borough of Newry, 2,745: in Newry Lordship, exclusive of the borough, 1,794: in Upper Iveagh 5,542: in Lower Fews 361: Upper Fews 530: Lower Orior 2,330: Upper Orior , exclusive of the borough 5,255: and in the whole Union 18,557. Of this total, the numbers with their values were as follows:
He is everywhere, the teller of tall tales. Some are interesting for their inventiveness. Some merely boring as they relate their teller’s single-handed exploits. One Newry man who served in Korea – Joe by name, but I’ll not tell you his surname for he’d torture me – never tires of telling how he defeated that army practically on his oneyio.
Then there’s mere boasting to outdo the previous tale.In our youth we commuted to and from the City by hitching a ride.Leo McSherry had as little as the rest of us but needed to demonstrate he travelled quicker, better and in style.You got a lift inside ten minutes, Leo was away in five.Your lift was in a Toyota, Leo’s benefactor drove a Jaguar.One day he was telling a particularly outlandish lie when my pal interrupted:‘You can’t beat this one Leo, and it’s the God’s truth.No sooner did we drop our duffle bags on the Downshire Road than down lands this helicopter.We were in Belfast City Centre within twenty minutes!’
George Connellan is a master of the tall tale.Listeners used to stand with bated breath and a mixture of delight and disbelief at his straight-faced brazenness and capacity for outrageous invention.I still cannot tell which tales had a modicum of truth.He built a swimming pool in his garden when he lived in the Glen.He neglected the formality of a survey and didn’t bother with the expedient of lining the pool to prevent seepage.In the three weeks it took to fill her, the water pressure fell for miles around and no one knew the cause.That is until the dam broke and there was a tidal wave down Glen Hill that took gardens and cars in its path.
He had a guard dog and a neighbour with a prized, well-groomed cat.Obviously the one hated the other (animals, that is) and it was the mutt’s ambition to devour the cat.Sure enough George came home one day to find his dog growling contentedly with the dead cat at his feet.It must have put up a good fight for it was covered in mud.
His neighbour not being home, George quickly dusted the dead cat down and laid it out on the mat on his neighbour’s porch, as though the cat had died in its sleep there.He then retired to the safety of his living room to await developments.He couldn’t believe the wailing and roaring of his neighbour when she came home to the terrible sight.He ignored it as long as he could, then rushed out to her aid.Unfortunately his dog followed him, with a particularly pleased expression on its ugly face.
‘What’s the matter, Missus?’ George asked.
‘You ask me what’s the matter?You know what’s the matter!It’s that dog of yours!’ she roared.‘Just look at it.Happy now, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t understand’, said George innocently.‘Is your cat all right?’ nodding in its direction.
‘My cat,’ she spoke slowly and deliberately, ‘As I think you well know, died yesterday under suspicious circumstances yet to be ascertained.’
She was making her own opinion of these circumstances well known.
‘I had to bury her in a grave I dug for her in my garden.And now that savage mutt of yours has gone and dug her up, and placed her corpse on my doorstep to torture me further.Either you or it, I don’t know which’.
Mention any story and he can top it. High diving? He was at a circus one time where yer man dived from a fifty foot pole into a wet sponge. Lost in the Sahara when he was serving in the French Foreign Legion he dropped out of the column and knocked the door of a convent. A nun came out and exclaimed to him, ‘God, George it’s you. How are they all in Newry?’ It turned out she was a cousin, twice removed, of Rose Marie, who is a cousin, trice removed of George himself.
We’ve all got so much older and wiser in recent years that it has become difficult to impress us with new technology. Yet I have a tale to tell in this vein. As this story concerns two men who are sadly deceased, but one who is very much alive and who might take umbrage, I shall refer to them by the initials D, E and V.
It must be galling for our local magistrates to have to listen to some defence lawyers’ appeals on behalf of incorrigible offenders.
‘They were acting completely out of character .. come from a solid and stolid family … had ingested excess alcohol … have since seen the light .. families committed to assisting them .. sworn to put their lives in order.’
Rarely have any of our solicitors had to face a task as formidable as that of Gary Newbury defending twenty-five-year-old Jamie Williams of Glamorgan.Police investigating a house break-in found him cowering in an attic.
The bottom half of his body was covered in blue ink and nothing else, neither underwear or trousers.On top he wore the pink, shiny nightie of the lady homeowner and at his feet was a black, lacy all-in-one female body suit.In his pocket was a torn white bra and stuck on his foot was a used condom.
Mr Newbury explained that he had broken into the house with theft on his mind.Things then took a bizarre twist.He accidentally knocked something over on a shelf and found himself covered in an inky substance.Naturally he took off his saturated clothes.He grabbed some of the homeowner’s clothes to mop up the ink, but only succeeded in smearing it over himself.
Hearing the police arriving he naturally put on the pink nightdress to cover himself and stuffed the other garments in his pockets.He had no idea how a used condom had come to be stuck to his feet.
‘This incident has been a painful lesson to my client.He has had to endure ridicule, smirking and name-calling.He has had to do a great deal of explaining to his family and friends.’
To his credit, Mr Newbury delivered this explanation with aplomb.Still Williams was jailed for four months.
Best-known for playing kidnap victim Rose Stagg in The Fall, Newry-born actress Valene Kane holds all the power in her latest role as an ‘alpha female’ barrister in legal drama Counsel. This drew her back to Northern Ireland for the pilot project and she has hopes of it being made into a series.
Newry actor Valene Kane plays barrister Olivia Harley in BBC One drama Counsel
YOU could say Valene Kane is an actress prone to perilous situations – being kidnapped by a crazed Jamie Dornan in The Fall is only one of them – but in her latest role, the Newry-born star of Thirteen and Rogue One: A Star Wars Stor’, faces danger of a different kind.
Valene Kane in BBC Drama Counsel
In new BBC one-off drama Counsel, Kane steps into the killer heels of “alpha female” Olivia, a barrister who complicates her professional and personal life when persuaded to take on the case of a schoolboy client played by newcomer, Adam Gillian.
“On the surface, Olivia has it all: a powerful career and a husband [Declan Conlon] who is in the running for Lord Chief Justice – but she is growing tired of playing second fiddle…” teases the actress, speaking down the line from London where she lives with husband and fellow actor, Ed Cooper Clarke.
“When we meet Olivia, she’s sort of at a crossroads and doesn’t realise she is a little bit dead inside, so, when she meets this young boy, he ignites this free spirit inside her; a free spirit she didn’t realise existed.”
Valene Kane Is a Rising Star
The actress, who is currently filming HBO crime series Gangs of London and recently walked the red carpet at the Sundance Film Festival in the US – for the premiere of her latest movie, Sonja: The White Swan – was delighted to be back in Northern Ireland for the project, commissioned through the BBC’s New Perspectives initiative.
Penned by newcomer David Allen and directed by Declan Recks (The Truth Commissioner), Counsel showcases the emerging talent of Gillian as 18-year-old Gareth Fleming, a motherless young student whose educational future hangs in the balance after his father suffers a stroke and is unable to pay mounting school fees.
“It was so good to be back home again and involved in this project,” Kane enthuses. “Everyone working on the drama wants to see more work like this – we were so excited because we all grew up here and felt very connected, whether we come from Northern Ireland, or from the south.
“I’ve read a lot of scripts recently with good female leads, but not female-centric stories. Why I loved Olivia’s character in Counsel is essentially because it’s her story… it’s the confusion that a woman of a certain age faces when she hits a certain point in her life – her career’s going really well, but does she want kids? What’s next? Those questions relate to everyone, I think, and that’s what drew me to it.”
Describing herself as “a bit Type A personality, a bit of an alpha female” herself, the London Central School of Drama-trained daughter of former Down county Gaelic footballer and coach Val Kane says she understood that part of Olivia – even though she is “more disorganised, messy and bohemian” in real life.
But, understanding the role from the inside out is something the actress, who also starred in recent BBC drama Death and Nightingales – again with Jamie Dornan – takes completely to heart.
She makes ‘mood boards’, puts together Spotify playlists and keeps a scrapbook to help identify with her character long before the cameras start rolling.
“I use artistic mood boards for every character and I’ll keep a scrapbook with pictures and textures to help me feel what they feel,” Kane explains. “For the role of Olivia, I also worked very closely with the costume designer because I had a clear idea of how I thought she would dress and want she would want to wear.
“My father-in-law is a High Court judge and so I asked him lots of questions too… it’s a world I’m fascinated in anyway, the legal world. I think Counsel has great legs; it definitely has the potential to be made into a series.”
But even with such fastidious preparation, born out of love for the craft she has pursued since teenage years with the National Youth Theatre, the now 32-year-old is still reluctant to watch herself on screen.
“I find it very difficult, especially the stuff in which I have the lead in,” Kane reflects. “I find it hard not to critique myself and then I lose the enjoyment of just watching it. I usually get my husband to watch if first and then he tells me what he thinks…
“He’s more of a writer [than an actor] now, which is better for us, as he’s the person in one place, writing, and I’m the one who travels. It helps, I think, that we’re in the same profession, as he understands how I have to drop everything sometimes when an acting job comes up.”
Kane, who suddenly found herself reading for high profile roles following her compelling portrayal of Rose Stagg, the ex-girlfriend of serial killer Paul Spector (Dornan) in Allan Cubitt’s The Fall, is delighted that now her dream career – in defiance of the initial wishes of her parents who wanted her to attend university and study law for real – is taking off.
As well as Sonja: The White Swan – a film about Sonja Henie, Olympic figure skater and later Hollywood actress – Kane is also awaiting the general release on another movie, Profile, in which she plays a British journalist who dons a hijab to investigate the phenomenon of young women being radicalised online.
Based on the 2015 non-fiction bestseller, In The Skin of Jidhadist, by a French journalist who now has round-the-clock police protection, Profile won the Panorama Audience Award at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival and has been her “biggest highlight” thus far.
“It’s based on a true story about a journalist who had a fatwa out on her head after her story broke so, initially, my agents were kind of wary,” Kane tells me. “But, I trusted the director, the producer and in the whole process.
“We ended up writing a lot of the script together and it was a very involved process in the editing suite afterwards. It felt very much like a producer’s role – and that’s something I think I’m heading towards in the future.
“There was a long period when I was really struggling, so it’s great to be living in London and able to work there as well now on Gangs of London. It’s the first time in my 10 years of acting that I get to stay in my own house and go to my own bed. That makes me happy.”
That this issue is not a priority for any political party on these islands currently is a matter of great concern. Brexit – and the very real danger of an imminent no-deal Brexit – dominates all, yet this too is most relevant. It is difficult not to conclude that Sinn Fein, in particular, wishes for that outcome, so that opposition (to a United Ireland) within the protestant community will be silenced in the face of economic catastrophe, loss of agricultural and economic support in the form of EU grants, trade and business contraction and increasing danger to the ongoing Peace Process from a porous but ‘hard’ border.
In the North, we have not a single leader in any party of the intellectual status capable of comprehending, much less solving the issues soon to face us. The DUP in particular, bereft of a single leader or potential leader is content in the short term to wallow in their very temporary position of influence nationally. Apart from the ‘cultural’ issues of ever-higher bonfires, indiscriminate loyalist marches and displaying portraits of the Queen, the DUP has a negative agenda only: no Irish Language Act, no abortion reform, no LBGTQ+ rights. Looking South gives little cause for optimism too.
The two decades since the signing of the historic Good Friday Agreement have been totally wasted. A sizable section of the nationalist community is turning away from the established political parties and looking to the burgeoning Civil Forum movement for leadership and inspiration. Try as they do, these good people seem unable to recruit intelligent, concerned and rational civic protestants to the cause. Yet it is less than two years till the 2021 referendum results confirms the inevitability of a pro-nationalist majority in the North, as well as in the South. By then it will be much too late to do the essential groundwork.
No one wants a sizable, obstructionist, malcontent and disaffected unionist minority in an all-Ireland Parliament intent only upon destruction. Yet how now does one mine the positive and progressive from this community which has so much to offer and will find widespread support in all communities for its efforts to maintain the best of British in our future society.
After much pain, anger and uncertainty, protestants (if not their political ‘leaders’) are coming to the realization that they have to reconsider their past and approach their neighbours, not in terms of ‘sell-out’ or ‘compromise’ but as an exercise in influencing the future.
To start, on the imminent ‘celebration’ of its centenary, the Northern state must be viewed as a failed entity which was ever viewed with bemused distaste from London. Today Boris, ever more dependent of the DUP votes, is happy to wrap the flag about him and wine and dine them, but inevitably he will dump them, to the huge relief of the British political establishment which is diminished and embarrassed by their presence.
The North – protestant and catholic alike – has a great deal to offer a future Ireland. It’s time to talk about it.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It’s apposite to our present age – though previous, and probably future generations thought the same. Surely Britain and Ireland, and more so, America are currently in a political and cultural turmoil, where those who screamed loudest for a return of ‘control’ have demonstrated their inability to exercise even self-control: the falcon cannot hear the falconer; the falconer has an agenda of his own, which bears little relationship to the needs of the masses.
No government has a concrete agenda to control global warming and no means to enforce one, were they to turn their minds to it.
What is the nature of that ‘rough beast’ slouching to Bethlehem to be born?
I sought Him on the purple seas, I sought Him on the peaks aflame: Amid the gloom of giant trees And canyons lone I called His name; The wasted ways of earth I trod; In vain; in vain! I found not God.
I sought Him in the hives of men, The cities grand, the hamlets grey, The temples old beyond my ken, The tabernacles of today; All life that is, from cloud to cloud I sought … Alas! I found not God.
Then after roamings far and wide, In streets and seas and deserts wild, I came at last to stand beside The death-bed of my little child, Lo! As I bent beneath the rod I raised my eyes … and there was God.
The photo above is of His Holiness the Pope, with Dr John McAreavey, then Bishop of Dromore – a man destroyed by Steven Nolan, may God forgive him.
