On the Fence
Extract from A Magical Line
Between heather and marigold,
Between spaghnum and buttercup,
Between dandelion and broom,
Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,
As between clear blue and cloud,
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated roof,
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.
Seamus Heaney, “A Herbal”
Though I grew up in a place of extremes, I am happiest On the Fence. It’s not the same as being in the middle: the Fence is not a place of compromise, but where possibility lives. It’s a place of imagination and myth, ambiguous, suspended between realities. A place where anything could happen.
It took me a while to discover this about myself.
It was a damp November evening in 1982. I had lived away from Ireland for almost a decade; in Toronto, I was a marketing manager with Lipton, a subsidiary of global giant Unilever. My boss had asked me to guest-lecture his evening class at Ryerson Polytechnic , while he was away on business. Still in my twenties, I had never taught anything, and it had not crossed my mind that I might have anything to teach anyone. But I agreed to give it a go.
Over the next couple of weeks, I prepared, prepared, and prepared some more. I drafted and redrafted. I walked into the classroom with close to a hundred slides—in the days before Power Point, transparencies for the overhead projector—for a sixty-minute class.
In the classroom, thirty students, only a few years younger than me, sat at melamine-topped tables. The chatter died down; notebooks were dug out, and sixty eyes gazed at me, expectantly. With trembling hands, I switched on the projector. I began. The students followed along, taking careful notes.
Someone asked a question: what was it like to work in marketing? Questions were not in my plan, but I answered as best I could. Then someone else. Before long, we were talking about how everyday products were vehicles of deeper meaning: doing laundry was a cultural, even political, act. I was no longer in control—but what the hell? I went with it, my carefully plans for the class in ruins, replaced by a free-flowing discussion of life and dreams.
By the end of the hour, I had got through eight of my carefully-prepared transparencies. I felt like a failure. All I had done, I thought, was direct traffic. But I had enjoyed it more than anything in my career so far, and I learned later that the students also loved the class. I was offered a contract to teach a full course the following year.
The memory of that night, the joy of being off-balance, in a place of uncertainty, stayed with me. In a classroom, unlike my job in business, you could be comfortably On the Fence: reality was suspended, ideas were playthings, and you never knew where you might end up.
Years later, I switched careers to become a full-time university teacher.
I grew up in a seaside village in the Republic of Ireland, near the border with Northern Ireland. Two certainties dominated life.
To say that the Republic in the mid-twentieth century was Catholic would be an understatement: every aspect of life was controlled by the Church. God, we learned, was everywhere; we could see it for ourselves, in the images of the Pope, Jesus and Mary on the walls of every home, every school, and every hospital. We were all sinners before God, and the biggest sin was sex: gays were locked firmly in the closet, LGBTQ+ unheard of, contraception illegal, and don’t even think about abortion (such thinking would be a Sin of Impurity).
The other certainty was our victimhood at the hands of the English. We were constantly reminded of our forebears’ sacrifice to liberate us from oppression. Yet our freedom would not be complete until Northern Ireland was united with the Republic, and the entire island ripped from the clutches of the foreigner. The fact that most of Northern Ireland’s inhabitants were Protestants, who were equally passionate about staying in those clutches, was a minor concern.
I attended the local Christian Brothers’ school, where both certainties were relentlessly beaten into us. For a while, I believed it: convinced I would grow up to be a saint, I set about converting my Protestant neighbours, which amused them no end. Thankfully, this phase ran its course.
By the late 1960s, everyone was talking about the Civil Rights protests in Derry and Belfast, and the emerging violence that would soon be labelled the Troubles. Here on the border, we talked about it incessantly.
My elder brother Paul took a job in Northern Ireland, where he worked alongside that exotic tribe, Protestants. Our father was hardly a card-carrying IRA man, but he had nationalist sympathies; he was also an intensely devout Catholic, an overachiever who, not content with Mass on Sunday, went every day.
At our dining table, I watched the exchanges fly back and forth: the Civil Rights protesters were just a front for the IRA, said Paul; the Black Protestants of the North were out to kill Catholics, said Dad. The debates were intense and passionate, each side as certain as the other, neither giving an inch.
On the morning of September 19, 2022, a Monday, I returned to the border area for the first time in half a century. My sister Barbara, sporting a COVID mask in this still-nervous world, met me at Dublin airport. All my four siblings, with the exception of Barbara, had emigrated—not an unusual family, in a country that made living anywhere else so attractive.
We sped northwards on the six-lane M1. No more chugging along behind hay-laden tractors or wayward flocks of sheep: Ireland had been transformed in the past three decades into a sleek, modern—and liberal—society.
Though still astonishing, this change was not new to me: I had witnessed these changes on previous visits to my family, though not to the border area. My mother, who had always longed to live in Dublin, moved away from our village in the early 1980s, following my father’s sudden death.
We chatted about my plans, which were vague at best. I mentioned that I had recently interviewed a former schoolmate via Zoom, and he had observed that the area where we grew up was different from the rest of Ireland.
“That’s what I found, too!” said Barbara. She had moved south-west, to Limerick, in the 1970s.
“When I moved,” she continued, “I was excited to find the real Ireland—you know, with the music, the pubs, and the céilís.”
Was Limerick’s Irishness any more real than ours in Dundalk? It was certainly better known: the west is where most of the tourists go, where you can kiss the Blarney Stone, stand on the Cliffs of Moher and look back towards America, warm the cockles of your heart with poitín by a turf fire. The west had done a grand job of creating a fairytale that Americans just lapped up, like a dog slurping Guinness from a pub floor.
In Dundalk, we dismissed these clichés with casual contempt. Our town, just across the Irish Sea from Liverpool and Manchester, had its own rough, tough, industrial version of Irishness. But it had a magical side too: a place of legend, home of the mythical warrior Cuchulainn, who single-handedly defended ancient Ulster against the armies of Medhbh.
But Dundalk had another unique quality, one that differentiated it from the rest of Ireland: located just south of the border, it was an in-between town.
This went back a long way. Not far away was the birthplace of St. Brigit, thought to be a continuation of a pre-Christian Celtic goddess. St. Brigid has always been associated with liminality, or in-betweenness. According to legend, she was born on February 1st, the threshold between winter and spring in the Celtic calendar, on the threshold of a door (neither inside or outside the house) and at the breaking of dawn (neither day or night).
Dundalk was firmly On the Fence: the biggest border town in the South was once an English garrison town, a bulwark against the marauding tribes to the north, but during the Troubles an escape route for IRA fugitives from the North. Depending on which pub you frequented, it could swing wildly between Anglophiles—“west Brits,” as they were sneeringly known—and die-hard nationalists who thought of little else but Getting the British Fuckers Out.
In her 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , Gloria Anzaldúa wrote passionately of what it was like to live between cultures on the Mexico-Texas border. “A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition,” she wrote.
For Anzaldúa, to live on a border was to be torn between ways, caught between oppressive cultures. Yet she envisaged the coming of a mestiza, a culturally hybrid, higher consciousness. The mestiza would be tolerant of ambiguity: “Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically.”
Barbara’s husband, Terry, was cozying by the fire when we arrived, watching the Queen’s funeral on TV. Cup of tea in hand, we settled in to join him. “Sure, they put on a great show, the English,” he said.