NorthMon Co-Ed History Dept.

Do you remember when Fairies used to cause major disruption to roads? No not me and me husband in July. In 1999, engineers building a motorway through County Clare found themselves facing an occult obstacle no survey had flagged. A single hawthorn tree, standing alone in a field at Latoon, just outside Newmarket-on-Fergus. Lone hawthorns are not to be fecked with. Cut down as part of a hedgerow, they're just trees. But solo in open ground, they become a sceach, a fairy bush, believed to mark the meeting point of ancient fairy paths or bealaí sí. These are the invisible routes the Aos Sí travel between one stronghold and the next. Interfere with one, and you invite misfortune. Interfere with one sitting on a fairy path, and you're inviting a supernatural shitstorm. The Latoon bush had the misfortune of standing right in the path of the planned N18. Road crews arrived to clear it when word reached Eddie Lenihan, a seanchaí who'd spent decades collecting stories like this one from farmers and neighbours across Munster. A local had once told him this particular bush marked a meeting ground between the fairy hosts of Munster and Connacht. This was some inter Provincial business. Disturbing it wouldn't just curse whoever swung the chainsaw. It would curse the road itself. Lenihan went to the press and story went international. And somewhere along the line, the people actually responsible for building a motorway through Clare decided the safer bet was to build around a bush rather than risk finding out whether an angry crowd of nationwide Fay folk could really enforce some fairy FAFO. The N18 was redrawn and what should have been a straightforward stretch of motorway ended up delayed for close to ten years while the alignment was reworked to leave the tree untouched. When it finally opened as the M18, the hawthorn was still standing exactly where it always had, in the median strip near junction 11, close enough to the tarmac that trucks doing a hundred kilometres an hour pass within a few metres of it every day.

In the summer of 1940, hundreds of corpses appeared along the shores of Mayo, Sligo, and Donegal. Locals and Gardaí found bodies caught in kelp, cast onto rocks or drifting into quiet bays. They were the mangled and water bloated corpses of Italians, Germans, Austrians and British soldiers. The victims of the Battle of the Atlantic who had been carried for days by the restless currents. For the neutral communities of the west, it was a shocking reminder that the war was at their door. The story began on the 2nd of July 1940, when the SS Arandora Star, a converted passenger liner pressed into military service, was torpedoed by U-47 some 75 miles off Donegal. On board were over 1,500 souls, around 800 German and Italian civilian internees, their British guards, and the ship’s crew. It was a grim cargo of men bundled aboard in Liverpool and sent across the Atlantic to internment camps in Canada. The Arandora Star bore no Red Cross markings, and when the torpedo struck, more than 800 lives were lost. Among them were men who had fled Nazi persecution, only to drown under a British flag. Over the following weeks, the sea began to surrender them. Bodies came ashore in Donegal’s Rosses and Inishowen, on the sands of Sligo’s Mullaghmore and Drumcliffe, and along the wild coastline of Belmullet in Mayo. The new Coast Watching Service, set up to guard neutrality, was quickly forced into the role of undertaker. Gardaí recorded each discovery, fishermen helped haul the remains from the surf, and local councils struggled to find enough coffins and graves. Some of the dead were nameless, buried under simple crosses marked “Unknown Seaman.” Others could be identified by papers, photographs, or the fading ink of a paybook tucked into a pocket. In Termoncarragh graveyard, Belmullet, two men were laid side by side. Luigi Tapparo, an Italian internee, and Trooper John Connelly of the Lovat Scouts, his British guard. In death, they became neighbours in Irish soil. The tragedy was not confined to the Arandora Star. Just weeks later another troopship, the Mohamed Ali El-Kebir, was torpedoed by U-38 in the Atlantic. Many of her victims too were carried eastwards, joining the grim tide of corpses that washed up through late summer and autumn. At its height, over 200 bodies came ashore in a matter of weeks, forcing the reopening of famine-era graveyards that had lain untouched for nearly a century. For the communities of the west, 1940 became the year of the “men who came in with the sea.” Children walking beaches stumbled upon corpses. Parish priests blessed the dead in hurried ceremonies, often in languages they did not speak. Local people, bound by decency and tradition, carried out burials with dignity, regardless of whether the bodies wore a British uniform or carried an Italian rosary. Today, the graves remain scattered along the coastline. Carndonagh in Donegal, Ahamlish and Drumcliffe in Sligo, Termoncarragh and Fallmore in Mayo. Some bear names, many do not. They are markers of a strange and terrible summer, when the Atlantic brought the war to Ireland’s shores, and the west became a cemetery for the drowned of Europe.

Anabels nightclub in the posh Burlington Hotel in Dublin 4, was supposed to be the kind of place "nice" young people went, according to gobshites who think wealth is a reflection of moral value. In the early hours of 31 August 2000 a row broke out after a debs night, the kind of scrap that happens all to often outside clubs every weekend Dublin only this one ended with 18 year old Brian Murphy dead on Sussex Road. He'd been brutally kicked and punched while he was helpless on the ground. The cause of death was recorded as cerebral oedema and asphyxiation. Brian Murphy was there with a friend and he'd recently finished his Leaving Cert. He was working a summer job in Brown Thomas. Earlier that evening, he mentioned to a mate he felt a bit uneasy about potentially running into a group of lads he previously had hassle with. But everything went ok inside that night. The situation changed dramatically around 3:00 AM as the venue closed and crowds spilled out onto the street. Outside on Sussex Road, groups of teenagers loited, engaging in what was described as rowdy horseplay that quickly turned hostile. A sudden altercation broke out involving Brian and a group of up to ten iyoungfellas. The confrontation turned vicious as Brian was surrounded and they started battering him, punching him until he collapsed and then kicking him The entire violent mercilless frenzy was over in under five minutes. Friends immediately ran to Brian's side as the group of cowards scattered. He was unconscious and bloody, they moved him across the road to safety and called for an ambulance shortly after 3:10 AM. He was rushed to St. Vincent's Hospital, but doctors were unable to save him. Brian Murphy died hours later from severe brain swelling and airway obstruction resulting from facial trauma. Four young men were eventually charged with his manslaughter and violent disorder. Dermot Laide, Sean Mackey, Desmond Ryan and Andrew Frame. Three of the four had gone to one of Dublin's most expensive schools Blackrock College. The trial didnt start till 2004 and became a national obsession. Court 23 was packed every day.And people started to notice the distinct undercurrant of sympathy for these "nice" affluent young defendants both in the court proceedings and in some circles of society. The tone of the narrative was these lads were from "good homes" and so Brian Murphys horrific death mustve been a few moments of drunken madness. Dermot Laide was convicted of manslaughter and violent disorder, and got four years. Sean Mackey got two years for violent disorder. Desmond Ryan got nine months and Andrew Frame was acquitted outright. Laide then appealed and won, and his manslaughter conviction was quashed in 2005. Ryan's conviction was overturned too due to an invalid search warrant. A retrial was ordered for Laide, but by 2006 the DPP pulled the plug, citing "evidential problems" due to conflicting medical testimony regarding the precise cause of death alongside witness complications. He walked free still insisting he never caused Brian's death. A coroner's inquest finally closed the book in 2007, returning a verdict of unlawful killing. Anabel's itself is long gone. The Burlington Hotel was extensively refurbished and renamed the Clayton Hotel Burlington Road. But the response by our legal system and parts of our society to the unlawful killing of 18 year old Brian Murphy that night in 2000 exposed an ugly reality about class and privilege and who Irish society finds it easiest to forgive which is still sadly relevant today. Pictures below: Andrew Frame, Seán Mackey, Desmond Ryan and Dermot Laide and the victim Brian Murphy

In the summer of 1997, Steven Spielberg turned Wexford in to one of the bloodiest battlefields of World War 2, Omaha Beach in Normandy France. Them iconic opening twenty-four minutes of Saving Private Ryan were shot entirely at Ballinesker and Curracloe Strand, a few miles north of Wexford town. Ironically rather than being preserved, the real Omaha had long since been redeveloped by tourism. Spielberg was tipped off about the location by Mel Gibson. He was fresh off Braveheart, which was largely shot in Ireland with the FCA as extras. FCA stands for Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil, which translates to the Local Defence Force. Theyre our Army Reserve and are actually deserving of far more respect and aknowledgment than they often get. Anyway Mel told Spielberg about the natural beauty and our defence force willing to get stuck in. What followed was a logistical siege of a different variety. Crews built service roads from scratch to get trucks and hardware onto the sand. They constructed bunkers, battlements and those X-shaped steel obstacles the Germans used to wreck landing craft and break up infantry columns. The village of Curracloe didn't even have three-phase electricity until the production arrived and had it connected. Around 1,000 members of the FCA served as extras, alongside roughly 400 crew and whole units of stuntmen. There were around 1,500 weapons on set a mix of real deactivated firearms and fakes, and every one had to be stripped of sand each night. The guns, not the lads. The beach was rigged with controlled explosives. Many of the wounded soldiers in the beach scenes were played by actual amputees, fitted with prosthetics to simulate the horror of the landing. The one exception was a young actor/chemistry teacher called Bryan Cranston, playing a soldier with a missing leg. The shoot ran for roughly three weeks that July, and the weather cooperated giving the crew over twenty usable shooting days. When they packed up, the beach was restored to exactly how they'd found it, courtesy of an agreement with the Cooper family, who have owned the land behind it for generations. Curracloe returned to being a quiet Blue Flag beach popular with dog walkers and swimmers. Buy the Dublin Time Machine a pint and support the DTM Book ko-fi.com/buchanandublintime…