Midland

No one has the same affinity for a car that was at one stage almost equally...

common oh yeah Corollas were everywhere I imagine it must have been like imagine being a Toyota dealer in the Midlands of Ireland must have just been great crack you buy a holiday home on the same road yeah and another Corolla there you go just knocking them out the door especially 7th generation which was E10 was just like that was in the 90s I think that was kind of the that for me is like the ultimate Corolla Ireland spec.

But you still see so many that someone bought in 1989 or 1993 and they're still in the garden languishing because they've never gone, well, I need another one.

No.

On Wednesday, the 11th of February, 2015, the sky is a flat, matte grey, but the grounds are alive with the vibrant, theatrical energy of a major wedding.

Dozens of guests from the Irish traveller community have travelled from across the Midlands, their cars filling the gravel lot, the air thick with the hum of catching up, the rustle of formal dresses and the laughter of children running between the headstones.

Among the arrivals is 63 year old Bernard McGinley, known to everyone simply as Barney.

He is a grandfather, a respected elder within his family, arriving in a white van with his wife to celebrate what should be a day of uncritical joy.

The white silk of bridal wear is ignored as family members scramble to lift Barney's heavy, bleeding frame into the back of a van, desperately racing toward the nearest police station in Lissnesquie while his life slips through their fingers.

This was the spark.

This was the moment a localised grievance transformed into a blood feud that would terrorise the Midlands of Ireland for nearly a decade, drawing in 14 different families, rewriting the rules of modern street warfare through social media and turning everyday public spaces from shopping centre pharmacies to sacred funeral homes into heavily armed combat zones.

You're listening to the National Award-nominated Shadows of Eire, stories from the darker corners of the island, told with care for those who lived them and those they left behind.

People call it Jack of the Lantern, or Jack-a-Lantern.

and it is said that anyone who sees it should not follow it for jack lonely and lost will lead them out into the bog away from the road into the deep pools and soft places where the ground gives way underfoot and they will never find their way home A still, misty night in late autumn, on a great bog in the Irish Midlands.

The bog stretches away in every direction, flat and dark and silent, under a sky of thin drifting cloud, through which a pale half-moon shows now and then, and is hidden again.

The ground is soft and spongy, a deep carpet of moss and heather and rushes, wet underfoot, giving a little at every step.

story.

It opens in 1982 in a small town in the Irish Midlands, which is a very thinly disguised version of Nais in County Kildare, where I grew up.

So I come from the north.

And when I was 12 in 1979, my family moved south for various reasons to do with the Troubles, and we ended up in Nice.

Let's get into it.

One day, Fionn MacCull was heading towards the Midlands of Ireland, back towards where he was born, to visit his friend Ciarán MacFintan.

And Ciarán was a bit of a headbanger.

He had taken part in the great saga of Antoine Bo Cúileann.

Okay.

We'd first moved to the northwest of the country, but after a year of living there, we then relocated to the Irish Midlands, as my dad had gotten a new job working in Dublin.

My parents had bought a cottage on the outskirts of a very small village that was a stopping point from one of the larger towns to the next.

This village was so small and remote that there was basically nothing to do.

She was 2024 Writer in Residence at The Centre Cultural in Paris.

She lives in the Irish Midlands, where she's working on a new novel and a short story collection.

Hi, Niamh.

Hi, how are you?

We're in Monash University's city centre property on Collins Street on a paradisal morning to record this episode.

It seems a long way from the Irish Midlands.

We're going to discuss a debut novel, Orla Mackey's Mouthing.

And my guest today is Paul Giles, professor at the Australian Catholic University.

So, um, yeah, for example, I've-- my projects have brought audiences through, um, all kinds of places.

Um, they've brought them through city streets, uh, uh, to bogs in the Irish Midlands.

Mm-hmm.

Um, they've brought them to beaches, um, on train stations, um, all kinds of places.

Our approach will be to tie it into a regional strategy with TINA.

We're looking at the Irish Midlands as a whole.

The keel license is 67 kilometers only from TINA.

And our intention is to be able to develop the resources with a minimal footprint, right, from an environmental perspective, show ourselves to be responsible owners and go from there.