THE TIMES WE LIVED IN:YOU'D NEVER GUESS, from the exuberant expressions and obvious delight of this happy band of people, that they were working to promote cross-Border co-operation. You'd think they were just having a party.
But then, there always was something of a party atmosphere around the Peace Train project. Which is not to say that it didn’t have an entirely serious purpose. When the first peace trains ran on the weekend of October 28th, 1989, IRA bomb alerts had closed the railway line between Belfast and Dublin for 50 days in the previous five months, causing a major disruption to passenger and freight traffic.
It also caused a major pain in the ass for anyone who had reason to travel between the two cities. The journey almost always – at some point – involved the tedious business of getting off the (warm) train and on to a (cold) waiting bus.
Among those thus discombobulated on a regular basis was the writer and Irish Times columnist Sam McAughtry, who became the chairman of the Northern Peace Train committee; his Southern counterpart was the historian John de Courcy Ireland.
There was to be no mercy even for the peace train’s maiden voyage, which was disrupted when a telephoned bomb alert closed the line from Newry to Dundalk overnight. Undeterred, many of the passengers spent the night on board at Portadown station.
Happily, the call proved to be a hoax.
Our photo shows a scene from the fourth Peace Train event in 1992, when 1,000 people travelled on a shopping trip designed as a gesture of support for the people of Belfast. The merry travellers in the picture are members of a peace group from Portrane, Co Dublin. The return fare was a symbolic £1, and some Belfast shops did one-to-one exchange on the punt for the day.
Taking a wild guess, the smiles and gestures of triumph have nothing to do with this temporary fiscal policy. The obviously genuine jubilation of these purveyors of peace is all the more moving in the context of the recent po-faced pontification about whether it is, after all, quite proper to go shopping on the “wrong” side of the Border any more.
[ irishtimes.com/archiveOpens in new window ]
Published on March 2nd, 1992 photograph by Paddy Whelan
