Sadly, this was not the case, but the people did often outsmart and outwit these customs men.
The controls were operational and at times quite severe, up until 1 January 1993, when systematic customs checks were done away with between European Community member states upon the establishment of the Single Market.
But with the new Brexit laws and the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, these hard borders and custom controls could come back.
And if they do, so too will the inevitable acts of smuggling and more stories will follow.
Monaghan is bordered by six counties, three of which are part of the United Kingdom. Those three are Tyrone, Fermanagh and Armagh and the other three, which are in the Republic, are Meath, Louth and Cavan.
As Monaghan is right in the middle of these six counties, it was a perfect location for smuggling goods from the north to the south and vice versa.
I was told many stories about smuggling and I would like to take this opportunity to share them with you as the stories have become local folklore of a sort. However, I will refrain from using any of the names of the characters in the stories for various reasons. But maybe you just might recognise a few of them yourself …
When I set out on my journey to gather stories in Co. Monaghan, my first point of contact was the library in Clones, where I had been invited to tell stories by Deirdriu McQuaid the previous year. I enquired about local characters who would be good to get in touch with. I was sent without hesitation to the house of Dan Kerr. I was told that he was a man of 96 years of age and had plenty of tales to tell.
When I arrived at his house in Clones, I was surprised to find that he looked a lot younger than his years. He was only too happy to tell me some of the stories he knew.
In between endless cups of tae and slices of homemade fruit cake, we talked about his time working on the buses and how, back in the 1950s, Patrick Kavanagh had been one of his regular customers.
As we talked, it felt like I was on one of Dan’s old bus routes, with various people coming and going from his house, some delivering coal and hot dinners and some just dropping in to say hello.
He talked about well-known Monaghan characters, some of whom were known for being good, whilst others were renowned for less admirable activities, such as smuggling.
The first fella he told me about used to go over the border from Monaghan to Armagh on a regular basis with a bicycle. Now, the customs men were getting a bit suspicious of this boy, who kept coming and going over the border with a bike that he always cycled from Monaghan but walked with when returning from Armagh.
This went on for quite a while until they noticed, upon closer inspection, that the tyres of the bike were worn when he was leaving Monaghan but when he was coming back from Armagh, he had lovely new tyres on the bike, which looked like they had never been used.
Well, it turned out that this boy was smuggling tyres and doing very well out of it until he was rumbled by the customs men.
Now, there was another fella that Dan talked about, who wanted to bring back a turkey for his wife one Christmas back in the 1950s. Monaghan was short of turkeys at the time and they were more plentiful in the North. So off he went and he got himself a turkey and was happily bringing it back to his wife when he was stopped at the border by the customs man. He was quizzed about where he had got the fowl from and where he was taking it. Unfortunately, there was no getting around it. He had no alibi except that he was taking it back to his wife, and he knew that she would be very disappointed when he returned without the festive bird. (Northern Ireland (UK) was short of turkeys at the time and they were more plentiful in County Monaghan as it is in Republic of Ireland, and therefore not subject to postwartime rationing.)
Well, the customs man took pity on the poor fella and it was Christmas after all, so he wrote him a note stating, ‘Please allow this one Turkey to pass’, or something like that, and he put a special stamp on it, just to make it all official.
Well now, Dan told me that this same man used this wee note at as many different border patrols as there were and in doing so smuggled scores of turkeys across the border!
So I bid my farewells to Dan Kerr and shook his hand, the same hand that had shaken the hand of Patrick Kavanagh all those years ago.
The next man I met was Danny Aughey in Monaghan town. We met at the Westenra Arms Hotel in the centre of Monaghan. Danny had some fantastic stories to tell about Monaghan, some he had heard and some from his own experience growing up in Glaslough.
One of the stories he told from his childhood involved a man smuggling tobacco.
It all happened when Danny and a few of his friends were travelling home from school by train from Monaghan back to Glaslough. They were all in a box car, which held around ten passengers. Being in a box car also meant that you had to stay in the carriage and could not move to a different carriage whilst the train was moving.
Now, as they were waiting for the train to move off, the carriage door was opened by an auld farmer, who had decided to come down from Armagh to Monaghan to do a bit of smuggling.
He asked them where they were going and they answered ‘Glaslough’. With that, the farmer replied, ‘That’ll do’, and he proceeded to get into the carriage with them.
Now, in the late 1940s and during the 1950s, tobacco was scare in the North, so this fella had come to Monaghan and bought around ten plugs of tobacco and was taking them back over the border.
He asked the boys if they would take a plug each and hide them for him, as he didn’t have enough room under his hat to hide all the tobacco.
Well, the lads agreed that they would each take a plug of tobacco. They put the tobacco into their school bags. As there were four of them in total, the farmer was able to put the other six plugs inside his hat. The customs did occasionally check school bags, but these boys were well known and Danny’s father worked as a signalman at Glaslough Station, so they were all right.
Shortly afterwards, the customs man got on and looked at the boys and the auld fella in the carriage. He turned to the farmer and asked him if he had anything to declare. The farmer said that he did not and that he had just been at the fair and was on his way home. Well, the customs man must have smelt a rat because he asked the poor auld fella to stand up and the customs man proceeded to tap his coat pockets. He asked him to open the coat and then he checked his jacket. The customs man seemed happy enough with this and was about to turn around and get off the train when one of the young fellas (Danny never said who it was) got up and lifted the hat off the poor old farmer. Well, as you can imagine, the tobacco fell out from under his hat onto the floor of the carriage and the customs man lifted the tobacco and then lifted the auld farmer off the train too.
Now, as Danny said, these customs men were quite scary as they wore a uniform very similar to what a guard would wear, with the hat and the uniform and all the rest, so the poor auld farmer was pretty worried by all of this. He was taken to the office, where he would have been fined and would have had his contraband confiscated. A while later, the boys saw him coming out of the office again, looking pretty shook up. He got onto a different box car a bit further up.
Well, the lads felt very guilty about their wee prank and thought it would be a good idea to give the four remaining pouches to the old man. But they could not do it at the station as they would be caught and they could not get to him through the other carriages, so they had to wait until they got off at Glaslough. When they did, they ran over to the old man’s carriage and handed him his remaining plugs of tobacco, apologising for their mean trick.
Now, as Danny had mentioned before, his father worked as a signalman at Glaslough Station, and his father had told him the story of Sam’s Bridge, which is just outside Monaghan town and was part of the old railway line from Glaslough to Monaghan. There is now a filling station named after it outside of Monaghan town.
This is one of the more sinister stories that I heard about the smuggling business. According to Danny�
�s father, the events took place around the turn of the last century. During this period, pigs were slaughtered at home, as opposed to in slaughterhouses, and then they were salted and put in large jute sack, which is a large sack with a piece of rope sewn into the hem that can be closed and tightened by pulling on the rope.
These sacks were placed into a carriage at Glaslough and then were sent off to Belfast to a dealer. Now, there were always three or four pigs short on the Glaslough train and no one could understand how this was happening.
Well, it turned out that this fellow called Sam Bán (meaning ‘White Sam’) was sneaking onto the carriage before they loaded it and hiding in one of its dark corners with some old sacks pulled over himself. Now, this type of carriage would have been called a freight wagon and it would have had falling sides and an open top. This came in handy for Sam because, when the train would leave Glaslough, there was a steep hill shortly afterwards and the train could not build up any speed. So when it was moving at a snail’s pace, Sam was able to throw a couple of pigs over the side and let them roll down the bank and then he would throw himself out onto the bank, where he probably had a cart waiting so he could make off with his ill-gotten gains.
But this was all to come to an end for Sam, for on his last and final excursion, there was a thick fog about the place and it was very hard to see. However, this did not deter Sam, who was obviously making a tidy profit from these excursions.
He went through the usual routine of hiding inside the freight wagon and waiting for it to be loaded up and for the side to be put up and locked.
The train pulled away as usual and started to make its slow ascent up the hill. As it did, Sam lifted and threw the pigs over the side.
Then it was his turn to jump, but as it was so foggy that he could not see that he was crossing the bridge over a main road. When he jumped, he fell to his death on the road below and was found by some passers-by who informed the RIC (‘The Royal Irish Constabulary’). They came and also found the pig carcasses along the bank a bit further back down the line. They had been investigating the stolen pigs and quickly realized that this was their man.
When the culprit was identified as Sam Bán, the bridge from which he had fallen and met his demise became known as Sam’s Bridge.
9
THE BRAGAN GHOST
Monaghan man Danny Aughey told me this story of a spectral encounter that took place in Co. Monaghan over sixty years ago. It is a chilling wee tale but it has a warmth to it too. Even ghosts can get lonely …
There was once a railway station in Glaslough, Co. Monaghan, which was part of the Ulster Railway in the Republic of Ireland. Glaslough Station was opened on 25 May 1858 and closed on 14 October 1957.
Now, during the late 1940s and early ’50s, there were two taxis based at Glaslough Station. The fellas who drove these taxis never went too far: usually a radius of about five miles was as far as they would go. One of these taxi men was known as Ned McGovern and he was a great man to get you where you needed to be after you got off the train.
One day, in the early fifties, a man called Peter McKenna got off the train at Glaslough Station. He was what was more commonly known at the time as a ‘returned Yank’, which is just another way of saying someone who has returned from America. He came out of the station and, lo and behold, who was there. Only Ned McGovern, sitting in his taxi waiting to take weary travellers on the final part of their journeys.
So Peter went over to Ned’s car and he tapped on the window. Ned rolled down the window and asked him where was he for. Peter told him he was for Bragan. Now, Bragan is a Monaghan townland within the Bragan mountain range (also known as the Slieve Beagh mountain range). It touches the borders of Monaghan, Fermanagh and Tyrone and you can see views of most of Ulster and Co. Louth from it. It would be a very remote sort of a place, without much there other than gorse and grouse and very few people living there (although, funny enough, you will find a few McKennas in the area) and back then it was even more remote, but Ned agreed to take the young man to Bragan.
Well, Ned got chatting to Peter, who explained that he had been living in America for over twenty years, but he reckoned that his folks did not have long left in them so he had decided to come back and visit them. He could not believe that in all that time the place had not changed at all. Now, it was late and it was getting dark and Peter was trying to remember which lane was his. He asked Ned to stop at a lane that he thought was his.
When he went to pay, Ned said that he would wait for him to make sure that he was at the right lane, but Peter was pretty sure that it was the right one and thanked Ned for his offer, so he paid him and got out. He made his way up the little lane, which was covered in grass and could be a bit treacherous, so he had to mind his step.
Now, it was quite a walk and after a while it started to rain. Poor Peter was getting worried as the walk seemed to be longer than he had remembered it being, well over twenty years before, and he started to wish that he hadn’t refused Ned’s offer to wait for him.
In the distance, he saw a big holly tree, so he ran in under it for a bit of cover from the blasted rain. As he stood there, he heard footsteps coming down the lane from the other direction. He wondered who would be walking the wee lanes at this hour. Then the footsteps got closer and an old man came into his vision.
‘You’re home Peter,’ says the auld fella.
Peter was a bit taken aback by this as he did not know who the old man was at all.
The old man continued, ‘We haven’t seen you in these parts for a while now. Were you away?’
Peter replied by telling him he had been away in America and that he was back to see his parents.
‘How do you know me?’ asked Peter.
The old man explained who he was and said that he lived near Peter and his folks. Peter remembered who the old man was then. He had heard his father speak of him and his family, but he found it strange as he thought that the old man and his people were long since gone. Peter asked him what he was doing out at this hour and who he was living with now.
‘Ah, it’s just meself now and I wander about the auld lanes of a night, sure ’tis better than sitting up in the house on me own,’ says the old man. ‘I live up there yonder, a stone’s throw from here. Why don’t ya come up to the house and get out of the rain for a bit and sure, I’d be grateful of the bit o’ company.’
The old man pointed up the lane. Peter thought it was not a bad idea and he figured his folks had waited over twenty years, so they could wait a bit longer.
Well, they went up to the house, which was a nice wee cottage with whitewashed walls, a thatched roof and a half-door. Inside there was a lovely big turf fire with a pot hanging from a crook above it. There was a mud floor and an old rug upon it and upon that again were a couple of armchairs with cushions on them. At the side wall stood an auld settle bed, the likes of which Peter had not seen since he was a child.
There was a lovely smell of burning turf and freshly baked bread. On a table in the room, Peter could see a loaf of homemade wheaten bread and a lump of butter on a dish beside it. On the wall, he could see a picture of the Sacred Heart and an auld clock that looked like it had been telling the time since time began hung above the chimney brace.
Above the fireplace on the mantelpiece, there was an ancient-looking photograph of a young couple on their wedding day. It looked like it was taken a hundred years ago. Beside it sat an auld fiddle, a fine-looking instrument with the reflections of the flames dancing on its shiny surface.
Peter looked up at the fiddle and asked the old man if he could play.
‘I can o’ course,’ replied the auld fella.
‘Will ya play an auld tune?’ asks Peter, as he had not heard the authentic old music in such a long time and, to be honest, it was one of the few things that he really missed about home.
Well, the old man told Peter to sit down by the fire and asked him if would take a wee drop of the ‘holy water’ or the ‘Rare Old Mountain Dew
’, as it’s better known. Well now, Peter was delighted to be in a warm dry house by the fire and, better yet, enjoying a nice glass of whiskey.
So the auld fella poured two glasses of whiskey from a very old-looking bottle and handed Peter one. Oh! It was mighty stuff. The old man put down his glass after taking a drink from it and proceeded to take down the fiddle from above the fireplace.
He played the most beautiful tunes that Peter had ever heard. It was just lovely, sitting there by the fire, enjoying a nice dram of the ‘holy water’ and listening to that beautiful music.
Now, it was not long before Peter fell fast asleep with the heat of the fire and the effects of the whiskey, not to mention the soothing music.
Well, Peter woke up the following morning lying on the ground, wringing wet and shivering with the cold. There was no fire and there was not even a fireplace. All he saw were the ruined remains of what had once been a fireplace. When he looked up, he saw the sky, for there was not even a roof on the house.
Peter was in an awful state of confusion, for he had vivid and clear memories of falling asleep next to an open fire and listening to music played by his host the night before.
So he picked himself and his case up off the ground and he headed on up to his father and mother’s house, where he found them waiting for him. They asked where he had been as they had been expecting him the night before. He told them that he had been in the house of an old man who lived a bit further down the path, and he told them about the warm fire and the music and all the rest of it. Peter’s father said that this could not have happened at all for the old man that he talked about had died almost thirty years ago.
Poor auld Peter felt a shiver go down his spine when he realised that he had spent his first night back home in the company of a ghost.
10
A TRIP THROUGH
DONAGHMOYNE
This funny verse was written by a Dubliner called Kevin Motherway, who was a patron of the Bohemian Bar in Dublin and a council foreman.
Monaghan Folk Tales Page 6