Belleek, Pettigo, Ballyshannon, Bundoran and Surroundings 1922 - 1924

Wholesale Destruction and Attendant Compensation.

The Voices of 100 Years Ago

By John. B Cunningham

The setting up of the Irish border in Ireland in 1921 was a political act which had an incalculable number of consequences - some felt immediately and others well into the distance future these ranged from a military action on either side of the border to the minutiae of ordinary everyday life from the new price differentials to the everyday shopping to the farmer taking his donkey and cart with milk to those local Creamery. It was a seismic change for the local people along the border who had to try and live an ordinary life in extraordinary times.

The newspapers and media in general, plus historians of every shade have generally focussed on the various military activities, mostly small; indeed minute in comparison with the bloody horrors of the recent 1914-1918 war when a battle was hardly worth consideration unless the battle had casualties reaching into the hundreds of thousands. The statements of politicians are also highly focussed upon defending their stated positions and generally omitting to deal with the reality of imposing a border where one had never existed before.

This little volume wishes to focus on the little villages of Belleek and Pettigo and their respective hinterlands and will try to reflect the views of several eye witnesses of the Life and Times of the birth of the Irish border in 1921-1922. I have been gifted personal accounts of this turbulent period along the Donegal/Fermanagh interface around the time of setting up of the Irish border in 1921. They were written by people who took part in the events of the time, and these are neither varnished nor censored. Let the past speak and we might be the better for listening to it.