A retired former colleague, emailing about something once, mentioned in passing that I had become known in his house as “the Monaghan salient”.
I think it was meant as a compliment but didn’t seek clarification, just in case, because there was some ambiguity involved. Any compliment would have depended on the adjectival sense of the S-word, even if – as was clearly the case – my colleague was also punning on the noun.
Whenever someone makes a salient point in a debate or newspaper column, that’s usually considered a good thing. The word derives from the Latin salire, “to leap”, implying that the point jumps out at you, in conversation or on the page.
In the noun form, however, salients are often problematic. That’s because then they refer to territory, usually disputed. Indeed, they tend to arise only during wars, along shifting front lines, where they can be a hazard to armies on both sides.
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One of history’s most infamous examples was the Ypres Salient, so named for the Belgian city held by the Allies throughout the first World War but surrounded on three sides by the Germans.
So intense was the fighting there that when I visited the area a few years ago, I chanced on a rusted rifle bullet and a piece of shrapnel in a newly ploughed field, part of the “iron harvest” that still turns up annually a century later.
For Russians, meanwhile, the “Kursk Salient” of the second World War is at least as notorious. That too was three-quarters surrounded by Germans and led to the largest tank battle ever fought.
The original “Monaghan Salient”, to which my former colleague alluded, was a minor affair in comparison with those.
But describing the way the county protrudes into Northern Ireland, it became a vexed term in the decades between partition and the Belfast Agreement.
As usual, it was military people – British, typically – who used it, although unionist politicians also often complained of the threat the Monaghan Salient posed.
This was rhetorically questionable on their part, since the dictionary insists that a salient is “a projection of the forward-line into enemy-held territory”, which would have been nearer the IRA’s definition of Northern Ireland than unionism’s.
Still, as late as 1988, the Belfast Newsletter complained in a feature on Border security: “In the Monaghan salient, that large bump of Éire which projects into Ulster (sic) between Co Fermanagh and Co Armagh, there are only 11 anti-terrorist officers – on a good day.”
Military officers abhor a bump: even the ones who occupy one after penetrating enemy lines usually want to bring the rest of the front up to join it, quickly, so they can no longer be attacked from the flanks.
The other side, meanwhile, wants to flatten the bump by excising it at the base.
That drastic solution was suggested at least once in the case of the Monaghan Salient.
In 1958, during the IRA’s Border Campaign, a northern police magazine, the Constabulary Gazette, called the area a “jungle”, populated by “badly-reared youths and a number of ne’er-do-well adults, paid from God knows where”.
The article continued: “The existence of the salient in peace time was always a monument to political ineptitude.”
So by way of remedy, the Gazette called for a new border running in a straight line “from Dundalk to Castle Saunderson in Co Fermanagh”.
The excised area “could be cleared in a fortnight by troops”.
Simple as it sounded, that ingenious plan was not taken up by the governments in Stormont or London.
But then again, politicians had found even the modest amendments suggested a generation earlier by the Boundary Commission too much trouble.
Monaghan was central to those too, thanks in part to Drummully, aka “Coleman’s Island”. A salient on a salient, Drummully comprises 16 townlands, a unit of territory once known as a “ballybetagh”. The rest of its inherent logic is long since lost.
Nobody now living knows how it ended up in Monaghan, surrounded as it is by Fermanagh – not just on three sides but on all – but four.
The link is a narrow isthmus, barely 100 metres wide, where no road runs.
Meanwhile, two fingers of Fermanagh descend around the pene-enclave, threatening to nip it off.
When the mere county borders became an international frontier there, much confusion ensued, especially for those in uniform. Running through “the Little Republic” – one of the area’s several nicknames – the main Clones to Belturbet road now crossed the Border four times in close succession.
The Boundary Commission looked into the problem – literally – 100 years ago. But nothing happened there or anywhere else. The anomaly survived and still does, its complications now eased by peace.
Peace also explains why no-one uses the term “Monaghan Salient” anymore, as far as I can tell, although the area attracted renewed international attention in the years after Brexit.
Tellingly, one of EU negotiator Michel Barnier’s early fact-finding missions was a visit there.
In the mid-Monaghan village of Lough Egish, he met local politicians and farmers.
He also spoke to reporters (including this one) and made a series of points – all of them, to one degree or another, salient.