Readers Stories

I returned back to my border town in the mountains a few days later but with a completely different perceptive on the place that I had called home for the past few years.

Read morePart Three: Walker

Newry has a proud and illustrious history of offering aid to the developing world – and indeed to the needy at home, both on the group and the individual level. 

Father Peter McVerry was recently presented on RTE with Man of the Year (again!) for his efforts with the homeless and addicts in Dublin. Dan Moore presently works in the same arena. 

Read morePerils of an Earth Walker 1.

Billy Lawson emerged unsteadily from the lavatory in Dunhill’s pub.

He’d been drinking since ten o’clock in the morning. He’d been outside at a quarter to, staring at the foul green scum lying like a thin knotty blanket on the flat waters of the canal.  

Read moreNo escape (Reader’s Story)

It was close to Christmas, the season of goodwill, and at the height of our ‘Troubles’ but like the great majority of Northern Ireland’s citizens, I – relatively unfazed and unscathed – was going about my normal life and business. 

Read moreGood Samaritans

 Does anyone know the way to Larne?

That was the question asked by our bus driver as we were about to set off from the AOH Club in Newry to go on one of our early trips to Celtic Park.

Read moreParkhead Trip 1984

Fourteen-year-old Catherine Murphy walked down towards Mount Street thinking about Mr Brown.  He might have said that he was all right, but he didn’t look very well.  Only the day before, she had heard her mother telling a neighbour that he looked very failed.  Most of the young people in the street thought that he was a bit peculiar.  He was always dressed in black and sometimes rode a really ancient bike, but her mother always said that he was a gentleman.

Read moreNever the twain shall meet

Bob Brown turned the key in the latch of his front door, gripped the lion’s-head knocker and pushed the door firmly to make sure it was locked.  He felt a strong tickle in the top of his nose and reached into his overcoat pocket for his big Irish linen handkerchief.  He sneezed into it violently.  A few seconds later he blew into the hankie, wiped it back and forward under his nose, feeling wetness on his upper lip. He coughed into the hankie several times and looked into it to check for blood but there was none. He crumpled the cloth and stuffed it back into his pocket.  Across the road, the herring-man clicked his tongue loudly to start his horse up the hill. He looked across at Bob but offered no greeting.  Bob wasn’t too concerned about that.  The man was one of the herring-chokers from Rosmoyle, and they were a queer lot.  Most of them didn’t like Catholics but it didn’t stop them taking Catholic money.  Bob was Church of Ireland  himself, but he saw no reason why other people couldn’t worship the same God in their own way.  None of them had ever done him any harm.  And what did all the Press-Button-Bs say about his church? – ‘Only a paper wall between them and Rome‘.

Read moreSawdust and Blood

The boy walked down Bagnall Street carrying a brown-paper carrier bag that clinked each time it brushed against the side of his leg. The front doors of the small terraced houses were open in the heat. All the doors were painted dark green except for the Haverns which was bright blue. Across the street the yellowing grass banks of the unkempt park rose to the graveyard wall of the church the English had built in the fifteen hundreds.

His grandmother had died on Christmas Eve and was buried behind that wall. He could see Brooke Street curving down along the other side of the park. His destination was the little public house on the corner where the two roads joined at the bottom of the hill. In the bag were six empty Guinness bottles. In the right-hand pocket of his short green corduroy trousers there were two shilling pieces and a scrap of paper on which was pencilled ‘2 stout’. 

Read moreImportance of meeting Ernie

‘You’re for it, ye oul b****x!! I’m getting my da for you’. 

A hasty retreat – a slammed door and he was gone. Nervous tittering from the class. The schoolmaster was aware of thirty pairs of eyes drilling into his skull. Internally he felt torn and twisted – anger, shame, embarrassment and indecision vied for dominance. It probably showed on his face too, and in his demeanor. He knew it was imperative to avoid any show of weakness. His continued authority depended on how he might react right now. Any hint of remorse or frailty would be seized upon and exploited. But he felt remorse.

Read moreA Life Saved