The Olympic flame crossed from Northern Ireland to the south and north again yesterday. A former British soldier re-tracing the northern part of the Torch route would have described it as Bandit Country — places like Newry, Lisburn, the Antrim Road Road in northern Belfast, all had a menacing ring about them. There are still tensions, of course, but for the most part the border has returned to what it was long ago: a verdant idyll where the biggest threat comes from locals flouting the no-smoking rules in pubs. Farmsteads in the Republic, once used by the IRA to stockpile weapons, are now just dairy parlours supplying milk across the island.
“That’s the thing,��� says Elinor, 23, a medical student from Ballymena who was staying with relatives near the old north-south border. “We have a European young generation now who don’t care about the old rebel stories. They’re just sad and pointless. That’s why this Torch is interesting, it is telling us something new about ourselves. How many times can you fight those old battles?”
We are standing opposite a concrete shed spotted with fungus, which used to be a no-man’s land. Nowadays almost everybody uses the motorway and the only indication that one has moved from the Republic into the United Kingdom is that the road signs measure distances in miles rather than kilometres. The two sides of the border exploit a few regional differences — the price of petrol, of solid fuel, the euro-pound exchange rate — but there is no question of digging into your pocket for a passport.
When the flame returned to the North, it was Laura Quinn, 12, from Newry who took up the Torch. She has taken up Gaelic football, referees the games of primary school children. And the last torchbearer of the day was a 28-year-old PE teacher and community worker from Belfast.
“Sometime we don’t know who is passing us by,” says Elinor, “And then someone in the crowd will say why he’s got the Torch, and you feel connected, the religion doesn’t matter at all, you just feel that you’re part of the same big club. That’s very modern isn’t it?”
Advertisement
That is what the web of Torch relays is starting to do: create modern links that give a purity back to the Games that have been contaminated over the past decades by politics, money and drugs.