Castleblayney is honoured. The Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, has flown all the way from Dublin to consult local people on his decision to close their barracks.

"Thank-you-for-comings" flutter deferentially through the close air in the meeting room as hastily-summoned community representatives and business people hear him announce a special fund of £1 million to make up for their loss.

Not compensation, we understand, simply an acknowledgment of Castleblayney's special position as a border town which has paid an economic price over the last 30 years.

You can hear their brains ticking over.

Everything goes well until a local businessman breaches that fine line between respect and servility which has so far kept them all in place.

"It's a black day for 'Blayney," says Mr Joe Brennan, president of the Chamber of Commerce. The Minister is committed to dialogue after the fact, but he bites back fast.

"Hands up who says no to a million pounds," Mr Smith demands. The representatives are embarrassed, but the Minister has silenced them. In Castleblayney, the first thing you learn is to know your place.

The place might as well be Timbuktu for all the power its local people feel they have.

"Us change things?" say two women pushing buggies around and around the town because the only playground is in a private housing estate. "They never listen to us."

Last night the National Anthem was sung in Irish with a mid-Atlantic accent at a midsummer disco. Crowds from Crossmaglen, Keady and Derry packed the Glencarn Hotel to hear the Wolfe Tones in concert.

Except for the stylish young people, 'Blayney has hardly changed since the 1960s, older folk confide, before the troubles brought Northern refugees to the temporary camp, now barracks for a support company which ends its stint on September 28th.

"What next?" someone wonders in a local pub.

The closure comes weeks after the local supermarket burned down. That put nearly 40 people out of work, a significant proportion of the wage-earners in a town of some 4,500 people.

The only tiger here appears in a petrol station. Bulging flower tubs, spruced-up buildings and new industry you see up the road in Carrickmacross, home base of Dail deputy Dr Rory O'Hanlon. It might as well be in another country.

No major industry serves the community - local businesses are the main employers, with few reaching levels of more than 60.

The barracks was the second largest employer in the town, and was seen by many as a rare sign that Castleblayney had some official status.

"We're sandwiched between Carrick and Monaghan," explains Mr Noel McGuigan, who chairs the local development association and wants to work towards an inter-agency approach for the town.

But no TD comes from the immediate area, and in a place where who you know seems to matter more than what you know, the suspicion is that 'Blayney is being turned into a satellite town where a barracks can close and the IDA or Forbairt give priority elsewhere precisely because it has no clout in the right places.

The barracks was a rare sign of official clout. It covers nine acres, six of which are hill. The soldiers will not lose their jobs, but the knock-on consequences for the local economy and its confidence are hard to estimate.

"How can the Minister value it at a million?" a representative asks me. "Where's the strategy we need for our town?"

The soldiers will be assigned to barracks at Dundalk or Monaghan, but that cannot compensate for the loss of camaraderie this proud, tight-knit, company must face. In a peace-promoting army, only officers expect to be transferred with any regularity, one retired man tells me.

This was a happy company: their deafness claims are minimal compared with other units. Three men are now serving in Lebanon.

"Write me a thesis on how to tell bad news to people who don't want to hear it," the Minister finally challenges the meeting. Then he takes absolute responsibility for the decision, absolving Dr O'Hanlon, the "normally rather timid" local representative who "approached me aggressively" about the decision.

Sources indicate that neither Mr Smith nor Dr O'Hanlon will stand in the next general election.

Mr Smith wants the town to agree on how to spend his £1 million bonus. But that seems unlikely. The representatives are riven by dissent, the Urban District Council locked in dispute with the County Council over plans for the extraordinarily beautiful Lough Muckno, now the subject of judicial proceedings. About 60 community or voluntary groups are competing to make the town a better place in one way or another.

He tells them it is "bad for business" to exaggerate their problems. Some wonder afterwards if this means they should keep quiet and be grateful for anything they can get. Others want to fight, but are at a loss to know how influence can be secured in the right quarters. Still others urge moderation and a contemporary approach.

Castleblayney is still talking about it. "We've been fobbed off by politicians for years," a man explains, "but we're no fools here, whatever they might think."

By lunchtime, the Minister has flown off again, en route to other disappointed towns where he is prepared, he tells me, to offer some money or land gifts to certain of them too. Dublin has rarely seemed so far away.