Others were running guns

…I was running the finest Lebanese hashish, in exchange for condoms.

Fun while it lasted: growing up in Co Louth, I was an amateur smuggler. Then my mother, ever the sleuth, found out. Photographs: iStock/Getty

Earlier this year my wife, who is Canadian, and I watched Canada play Ireland in rugby sevens at a tournament in Vancouver. Ireland won 17-7.

In 2016 we had travelled 3,500km, to Chicago, to watch Ireland triumph over the All Blacks. So, naturally, we celebrated with the Irish everywhere last weekend, when Ireland beat New Zealand on their home turf in Dunedin, in the second match of their international triptych.

But at that sevens match in Vancouver in April I had a dilemma: which team should I support?

My mother fretted, while my father’s explosive outburst — You’ve ruined your life! — stung. We married two weeks later, a faster timetable than we had planned, but ours was a loving relationship, and we were happy with the outcome

In the 1960s, Blackrock in Co Louth, where I grew up, was a drab seaside village of about 1,000 souls. But, as a Border town, it had its own unique flavour. For a few weeks in the chilly summer it would come alive with northern tourists, their skinny white bodies chasing multicoloured beach balls along the rippled strand. The Border loomed large in my life, and I was an amateur smuggler — though while others were running guns I was running the finest Lebanese hashish, in exchange for condoms, which were illegal at the time. The fun lasted until my mother, ever the sleuth, found out.

In January 1973 my girlfriend and I sat on a hard bench in the arts-and-commerce building on the Belfield campus of University College Dublin. We were in shock. I was 19, she was 20 and she had just received the results of a pregnancy test. We were terrified. We had committed the ultimate sin in Catholic Ireland, the sin of love.

Predictably, consternation followed. My mother fretted, while my father’s explosive outburst — You’ve ruined your life! — stung. We married two weeks later, a faster timetable than we had planned, but ours was a loving relationship, and we were happy with the outcome.

I found a job with Unilever in London, and we left the following year with our son Davy. Regardless of the shaming we experienced at home, I saw no reason to be embarrassed about our beautiful boy. Yet I knew I would never live in Ireland again. Bitter memories of Catholic puritanism, bigotry and intolerance were enough to alienate me from the land of my birth.

A few years later we moved to Canada. My wife, son and I settled happily in Toronto, and in the ensuing years we had two more sons.

It was on a summer evening, not long after our arrival, that I fell in love with this spectacular country. Drifting in a canoe with Davy, on a mirror-calm lake in Algonquin Provincial Park, north of Toronto, a magical silence settled over us. It felt unlimited, borderless. It was a vast, open land of lakes and forests; of bears, moose, eagles, wolves; of Northern Lights illuminating an enormous sky.

Canada was full of opportunity. I hated my corporate job, and in the 1980s I ditched the business world to study for a PhD. But in Ireland things were still tough. When I told an old friend in Blackrock about my decision he was flummoxed. Why would you give up a safe, secure job to go back to school? In the Ireland I grew up in, security was everything, career change a luxury and second chances rare.

I wholeheartedly embraced the Canadian experience. I took up skiing and skating, loved the fresh, frigid air, the sparkle and crunch of snow crystals at minus 20. Ireland became a distant, bitter memory.

Some years after my marriage ended I met Carol Ann, my present wife, and moved to Vancouver. Sharing an interest in the outdoors, we hiked in ancient forests, inhaling their intoxicating scent of pine and spruce. We kayaked, canoed and swam in the waters of the Pacific. We skied and snowshoed through mountain and valley. We celebrated rain, snow and sun with equal delight.

Yet I never felt truly Canadian. Welcoming as Canadians were, their shared cultural memories of wartime heroism, 1950s TV shows and glorious ice-hockey triumphs were lost on me. (I tried to play ice hockey, but my skating skills would have embarrassed a five-year old Canadian.) Canada was a great country, but it was not my country.

Then Ireland changed, in ways I could never have predicted. Within a few years peace broke out in the North, the country went from rags to riches and then back to rags, and it still ended up the second-richest country in Europe. The iron grip of the Catholic Church was forced open, and Ireland, once the most conservative country in Europe, became one of its most liberal.

I find myself proud to be linked to this strange new Ireland. But I haven’t rejected Canada. I still delight in Canada’s openness and wildness, yet I follow Irish newscasts closely, and support Ireland’s rugby and soccer teams. Brought up near Ireland’s Border, I am still in liminal space, a kind of borderer between Canada and Ireland.

As it happens, I supported Canada — as the underdog — in the sevens rugby match in Vancouver this year. (Had it been ice hockey I would have supported Ireland.) I wasn’t at all sorry when Ireland won handily. And last weekend, against the All Blacks, I supported Ireland.