“You’re not going, Megan. There’s been rioting all afternoon and apparently there’s a lorry on fire on the Buncrana Road.”
I thought my mother was being unreasonable. Overprotective. I wanted to go to Gaelic practice and a burning hijacked lorry a couple of hundred yards away didn’t seem like a good enough reason not to go. I was 11. I thought all of this was normal.
This is why we went across the border to Dunfanaghy for most of the summer. Summer in Northern Ireland meant marching season, which meant riots and rubber bullets in Derry. We weren’t usually allowed a TV in Dunfanaghy but in the summer of 1996 we brought a portable TV with us to watch the Atlanta Olympics. We also watched news reports that showed some of the worst riots in Derry for years. It felt odd to return home and see the burnt out shop fronts and flowers resting against the wall where a man was crushed by a Saracen.
Dunfanaghy was a real gift to me as a child. Its quiet benevolent forces were a stark contrast to the tension and aggression so often in the air and on the news in Derry. Some years my dad would commute to work from Dunfanaghy for the whole summer so that we could run free and wild away from the city. There was a simplicity to life in Dunfanaghy that allowed my real self to emerge.
There are many more houses around Dunfanaghy now than when I was a child but the simplicity of life remains. To this day when I go there the complexity in my mind and heart falls away. I feel a presence there, especially in certain spots (many of which we’re going to visit during April’s retreat). It’s a special place. And it’s not just about the sea and the mountain, the hills and headlands – I’ve been to other parts of the world with similarly stunning landscape and there’s something more than that at work in Dunfanaghy, I’m almost sure of it. There are forces we can’t see, holding us all gently.
