(CLOCK STRIKES)
The British government calls it Londonderry. Most who live here call it Derry.
This is the first sign of the deep divisions that have shaped the city's history.
Reminders of war dominate.
The great stone walls were built round a town called Derry nearly 400 years ago
to protect colonists from England and Scotland
to whose settlement James I gave the name of Londonderry.
Today's fortifications are the legacy of that decision.
The present Troubles began down here in the Bogside 25 years ago.
But Ireland never had it easy.
150 years ago, my great-grandmother fled the country
from the potato famines that claimed so many lives.
My railway journey, which begins here in Derry, is, in a sense, two journeys.
One tracing that best-kept of transport secrets - the Irish Railway system -
and the other an attempt to trace the Palin line back to my own Irish ancestor.
I begin this journey into the past by trying to catch up with the present,
to find out what it feels like to live in the middle of conflict.
Well, Derry seems to be undergoing something of a revival.
There's investment in housing and tourism.
They've restored a stretch of the Donegal Railway as a link line to the main station.
It's here, on a 60-year-old rail bus by the River Foyle,
I met Kate Bond, born and bred in the city.
Derry, to most outsiders - or Londonderry, I'm never sure which -
is synonymous with the present Troubles which began here 25 years ago.
- That's right. - How did that affect your childhood?
- How aware were you of it? - You are aware of it.
I have a lot of memories of coming home from school and being caught up in riots.
Tear gas. I can remember getting stoned a few times
because your uniform denotes what school you're from.
Also the checkpoints and the security presence,
but that has lessened over the years.
What do you feel about the city now?
It looks to be rather a fine city undergoing a bit of a regeneration.
It looks pretty good. How do you feel about it now?
I feel very positive about it. A lot of money has come into Derry recently
and there is a great optimism, a great spirit about Derry now.
- What are the bad sides? - That the violence is continuing.
25 years down the line over 3,000 people have been killed.
There's a lot of hurt, a lot of mistrust and that's going to have to be worked through.
You're very calm and sane about it all. How do you keep so calm and sane?
I've been living here for 25 years!
25 years ago the railways were fighting a rearguard action
in the face of savage service cuts.
In the Republic, the west of Ireland was virtually abandoned by rail.
A line from one end of the railway system to the other - Derry to Kerry -
is 250 miles on the map, but 650 miles on the ground -
snaking round the coast where the big cities lie.
If you're not in a hurry, this can be good.
The Irish love their history and won't let their railways die.
Special excursions, like this one behind a veteran of the Great Northern Railway,
is full of those who, like Tom McDevitte, refuse to forget.
I was a relief clerk on the railway, but before that I was an ordinary clerk
in a little town called Strabane,
which was the junction for the Donegal Railway.
- How many years were you on the railway? - About 40.
- Do you remember this engine? - Oh, I remember this engine.
This engine is the same age as myself. It was built in 1900... and something.
- And it's still going very well. - So am I, for that matter!
It's a lovely engine. They call it Slieve Gullion.
It's called after one of the mountains.
You'll see it between Belfast to Dublin on your right side. Slieve Gullion.
There's a photograph I want to show you of the Clogher Valley Railway,
which ran alongside the road - it didn't run, it crawled.
There was one place it stopped because it was held up by a goat.
A big goat. And the goat belonged to a woman called Maggie Colter, you see.
The goat used to stay there and the fireman used to pelt the goat with lumps of coal
and when Maggie thought there was enough coal to light the fire,
she'd call the goat in and the train would go on!
- What are you doing here? Is it numbers? - No. Timing. Timing.
Timing the train, seeing what sort of performance the engine's putting up today.
Up to now she's been doing very well.
What do you time it by? Your friend's concentrating hard on what?
- On mileposts. - Mileposts.
There's a milepost every quarter of a mile
and we can decipher with our times and the stopwatches what speed we're actually doing.
- How are we going? - Very good.
So are train enthusiasts sort of pan-Irish, non-sectarian?
I would say that all right, Michael, yes.
- A united front? - A united front for steam.
In a land where so much language is dedicated to division and confrontation,
this is a fair point.
They belong to the Railway Preservation Society of All Ireland
and the engine they restored first ran in the days when Ireland was one country.
There is something about railways that unites
and also something that makes life seem tantalisingly simple.
It's a world in which choices are made for you, courses mapped out, paths plotted
and the direction is always forward.
The north Irish coast is good to look at.
Big skies, wide bays, broad beaches and chunky limestone cliffs
frame the line dramatically.
And it only gets better.
This is Dunluce Castle - perched so precariously on its cliff top
that the kitchen once slipped into the sea while a meal was being prepared.
The Giant's Causeway is already in the sea.
It's a basalt rock split into 37,000 polygonal columns or, if you prefer it,
built by the giant Finn MacCool to bring his loved one over from Scotland.
And this is the 10. 15 to Belfast.
You couldn't have chosen a better season for travelling.
The greenery is so unsullied. The traffic hasn't dirtied it.
- I love this time of the year. - All I can see is drizzle.
Oh, no. I see beautiful green shoots and little white hawthorn blossoms.
- Do you use the train very often? - Very seldom.
I nearly had a heart attack when I bought my ticket.
It was £8.90, I think, and the last time I travelled it was £3.00!
- How long ago was that? - Longer than I care to remember! 10 years?
Do people use the train - your friends and acquaintances?
No. Northern Ireland is very car conscious.
Because of remoteness of living accommodation and so forth,
if you can afford it, you've an old banger and you use it.
- Have you an old banger? - No. I've a Renault 5, two years old!
Single track and stately speeds show where the transport priorities lie.
But it stops you from rushing.
I'd probably have missed this if I'd been on a Euro-express.
Shane's Castle - ancient home of the 0'Neills on the banks of Lough Neagh -
was destroyed by fire 170 years ago.
(TRAIN WHISTLE)
Here, amongst the fields and woods of County Antrim,
Lord 0'Neill has rescued some of Ireland's rich heritage of narrow-gauge locos.
I'm afraid it's fairly noisy.
- The track is not dead smooth. - Steam engines should be noisy.
What I want to know is how you became Lord O'Neill, the engine driver.
Well, I think I probably was almost born like that.
I kept my model railway going until I was getting on a bit, shall we say?
I put it away and then as soon as we started having children we got it out again.
I've always had a deep interest in railways.
This is an extension of, really, playing with railways as a boy?
Yes. It's a bit more than that in that it's a tourist attraction.
Unfortunately, in the context of Northern Ireland, where tourists are a bit scarce,
it's not as good as it ought to be.
(WHISTLE BLOWS)
Are you the only lord who's also an engine driver or are there other driving peers?
Um... Well, there are one or two.
I think we're a fairly small group, yes.
Tourism in Northern Ireland may never be an easy ride,
but I can thoroughly recommend the Shane's Castle Railway
as one of the slowest but happiest ways to cross the province.
(CLOCK STRIKES)
Belfast, capital of Northern Ireland, is one of my favourite cities.
No contender in an urban beauty contest,
what she lacks in looks she makes up for in energy, courage and determination.
Belfast not only lives with the problems caused by its fiercely divided communities,
it contrives to try and live well.
There's not an ounce of self-pity here or a hint of self-apology.
This soldier is a Belfast boy. For him it's the best city in the world.
Then why do some of its citizens still want to destroy it?
I take a trip along Falls Road with Ivor 0swald,
a local businessman who refuses to take sides.
This is a totally Nationalist part of Belfast.
- 100%? - 100% Nationalist and Catholic.
This developed in the latter end of the last century, based on some of the linen mills,
as the Catholic population came in from outer north of Ireland.
- What's on the right here? - That depicts Bobby Sands.
- The hunger striker. - Who starved himself to death.
Yes. But would be a hero of a section of the community.
One has to recognise this is a community that is entirely Nationalist,
has its own traditions and culture,
which hasn't been respected over the years and has led to alienation.
The Falls Road really isn't what I expected. It doesn't look like a war zone.
There's schoolchildren coming home from school,
little front gardens, hospitals and all that.
It's a normality of its own. If you look around the streets of the Falls and the Shankill,
people go about their business, as you and I would,
in what is predominantly working-class territory.
But you don't have to look far behind the normality of shops, schools and churches
to see the signs of something peculiarly Irish.
The myths and legends of military defiance, history, politics and religion entwined.
The root of the problems is the fact
that the Protestant Unionists of Northern Ireland are a minority in all Ireland,
whereas the Catholic Nationalists are the minority in the north.
Each, in fact, fears the other.
We're now entering Loyalist, Protestant, Unionist Shankill,
which takes its name from the Irish for "all church".
We've come from a district which will speak Irish to a district that doesn't speak Irish.
(PALIN) But the two of them back against each other?
(IVOR) Cheek by jowl, totally juxtaposed and now separated by peace lines.
We're now going to confront a peace line.
For some three miles, this separates the Shankill from the Falls Road.
You're looking at no-man's-land between the two communities,
which was, in fact, the very seat of the Troubles in the early part of the 1970s.
To a stranger to Belfast, you would look at this and say, "This is desolate wasteland."
It's more reminiscent of Berlin than anything we'd expect in our own country.
- Is there anything positive? - Yes.
Each side has its own culture, its own tradition
and no one should travesty the fact that they have a vibrancy of their own.
But you're looking at two traditions, two cultures, two nationalities,
and that is the essence of the problem.
They tried to find a solution to the problem at Stormont Castle -
once the seat of government.
They failed and now it stands helpless and redundant.
But it's not all bad news.
A stone's throw from Stormont, the film industry is alive and well -
the film industry of the 1950s, that is.
Noel Spence built the Tudor Cinema from a chicken shed in the garden of his bungalow.
His brother Roy, another Holywood tycoon, explains.
Within a radius of a very few miles of where we're standing,
I would say there must be 15 to 20 home cinemas.
- There's an epidemic of them in this area. - Why?
That's a difficult question. I've tried to analyse this myself and it's difficult.
About the 1970s when cinemas in general were having a bad time
and cinemas in Belfast were worse because of the Troubles...
In central Belfast there must have been about two or three cinemas to go to
and people started to develop their own home cinemas.
Noel, manager and projectionist, explains his programme policy.
Fringe films, you would call them, not mainstream.
Esoteric stuff like '50s JD movies - juvenile delinquency films from the '50s
or science horror films from the '50s.
- Is that your particular taste? - Yes. Which I inflict upon others.
- They don't seem to object. - There's an audience tonight?
Yes. There's an audience tonight.
The other cinemas in people's back gardens, do they all show different kinds of films?
- Are you in competition? - Absolutely not.
Some people like to show musicals, some show Westerns, film noir from the '40s.
I just happen to like the '50s and specialise in those particular B movies.
- How do you rate the film tonight? - I think the audience will enjoy it.
I enjoyed the audience more than the film.
Where else but in Holywood, County Down,
would people turn up in costumes from the movie?
I can't wait to see the audience for "Jurassic Park".
In Belfast, another day begins at the Europa Hotel -
proud holder of the title of "most bombed hotel in Europe".
It's a short walk to the Royal 0pera House
to meet its administrator - my old friend, Michael Barnes.
He's responsible for my affection for Belfast
and it is a cruel irony that three weeks after this,
a 1,000 lb bomb went off at this very spot,
blasting away the wall of his theatre for the second time in three years.
Today our destination is the new Ulster Transport Museum.
0ur fondness for Belfast is matched only
by an excessive fondness for all things railway.
- What sort of vintage would this be? - Early 20th century.
It would have been chugging around in the outskirts of Belfast taking commuters in.
What I like about Ireland is there are so many different railway companies.
- Yes. - What's GNR?
It is Great Northern. Of course, there was a Great Northern in England.
- And over here. - Wonderful coaches.
This is the Dundalk, Newry & Greenore Railway Company.
Britannia shaking hands with Hibernia.
Yes. Greenore was a cross-channel port.
Look at the variety of places that there are on there.
Yes. Strabane, alas, has no railway any more. All gone.
(PALIN) It's the biggest sign I've ever seen.
Build the station just to fit it.
Ireland once had 200 separate railway companies.
Mostly they used small engines for short distances, but they had giants as well.
This was the biggest engine to run in Ireland?
Yes. And largely from Dublin to Cork. There were three of these.
The touching thing is that this magnificent locomotive - it really is magnificent -
was actually a present from the South to the North.
- A friendly gesture. - So trains cross borders.
Absolutely. They do. It's in beautiful condition.
I think it could one day steam again.
Today's cross-border services leave Belfast for Dublin four times daily
and they're set to improve.
£80 million is to be spent upgrading the Enterprise service,
which is run jointly by North and South.
0nly four years ago the terrorists tried to kill it off all together.
The response from both sides was the creation of the Peace Train
by Chris Hudson from Dublin and Sam McAughtry from Belfast.
It began in October 1989 when a group of people decided that the policy of the IRA
of bombing the line between Belfast and Dublin didn't make sense
and it was time someone challenged it.
The way they were challenged was that a train was chartered,
a big notice was put across the front of it - "Peace Train".
It was filled with people from right across the divide.
Academics, politicians, ordinary folk.
We made the journey from Dublin to Belfast, brought the Dubliners north
and then we all went back down again to make a point.
One of the nice things I had happen
was there was a football match between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland
and a gang of lads from the Shankill Road, which is in the heart of Loyalist Belfast,
called the Shankill Defenders Club, phoned me and said, "Will you come to the match?"
I went to the match with them - they had Union Jacks and Loyalist flags,
but they had a Peace Train banner.
Every time they held up a Union Jack,
some of the Dublin supporters had apoplexy, screaming abuse at this Union Jack,
but when they put up the Peace Train banner, there'd be cheers.
In that sense, we claim that it's working.
We're running through south Armagh.
Rolling hills and meadows quilted with dry-stone walls.
It's also bandit country and beauty can be deadly.
As we cross the border, I'm left with two images of the North -
the military digging in on one side and a wedding on the other.
Life goes on.
(GAELIC FIDDLE PLAYS)
113 miles south of Belfast, and twice its size, is Dublin.
0nce the second city of the British Empire, now the capital of the Irish Republic.
British buildings like the Post 0ffice are now shrines of independent Ireland
and though the streets feel familiar,
there are characters here who could only be found in Ireland.
Like Molly Malones, ancient and modern.
- Anyone for tobacco? - Anyone for tobacco?
Only a pound!
In 0'Connell Street, the Irish show that they can be grand with their past.
Their national heroes range from the local - Jim Larkin, the trades union leader,
William Dargan, the railway builder -
to the world-renowned - Bernard Shaw, James Joyce.
For a country of only 3.5 million people,
Ireland continues to produce more than her fair share of world beaters.
I rode the train around Dublin Bay with one of them, The Edge from U2 -
the most successful rock band of our time.
A combination of healthy disrespect for authority and traditions within the Irish
attracts them to things like music... rock and roll, and writing.
All the great Irish writers tended to really take liberties with the form.
James Joyce being the obvious example.
He almost created his own language out of the English language.
Oscar Wilde with his aphorisms and...
His whole way of looking at things was very... very much his own.
And um... I think that spirit of questioning,
of not taking things at face value, of being a little bit suspicious...
has given the Irish a very particular way of looking at the world
and of things that most people take for granted.
There's something deeply personal about the way people relate to you in Ireland
that deflates the whole... personality of being a star,
which we find really helpful and healthy and we like that.
The whole idea of us being ambassadors, of people looking to us for leadership
or some clue to the way they should act or think completely terrifies us.
We much prefer that we're perceived as we are, which is just a rock-and-roll band.
More than half Dublin's million-strong population is under 25
and growing every year.
It's a far cry from the dark days of the 19th century
when Irish men and women couldn't wait to get out of the country.
In the National Library, I begin my search for one of them - my great-grandmother.
Her name was Brita Gallagher.
I know she went to America, but I want to know where she came from.
I've enlisted the help of Tom Lindert, a professional genealogist.
The "Index of Surnames" basically delineates all the names throughout Ireland by county.
Was there a family tradition as to where she came from?
- Well, sort of Tipperary and the west. - OK. That's understandable.
All I know is that she left some time between '44 and '50 for America
from, I think, Tralee.
There's a place called Blenneville where a lot of people left from.
She could have left from Blenneville.
She also could have left from Cork or possibly Limerick.
There's avenues open. It all depends on what happened in her village.
- There's the name Gallagher. - Is everyone in Ireland in here?
- Every family is indexed by county. - However humble?
However humble. These are just tithe payers or rent payers.
It's like a census, only you don't get biographical information.
Do you know any other information to narrow this down a bit more?
Um... I know that she went to the States and she was adopted...
I assume, by a lady called Caroline Watson, who she sometimes referred to as her aunt.
She was Caroline Watson of Burlington, New Jersey.
Watson is also an Irish name, so right there we have a clue.
It happened on the American side,
but often people who left Ireland went to people who they knew in America.
- So she could have been... - She could have been related.
The aunt thing maybe was right.
It gives us an opportunity to cross-reference the two names.
That way we can look for a place that has the surname Gallagher and Watson.
So we're narrowing it down.
- Is this ancestor tracing big business? - Actually, it is.
When I started genealogy about 15 years ago, I was the only one who was interested,
but as we started doing more research, it was amazing to see the growth.
One of the things that helped our company was we did Ronald Reagan's ancestry.
He was brought up by a cowboy family.
Actually, his ancestors were dirt farmers generations earlier.
- How do you farm dirt? - They moved with the work.
Moved where there was a demand for dirt.
This is Trinity College, Dublin,
founded at the time of Elizabeth I as a bastion of Protestant Anglo-Ireland.
The people's religion was always Catholicism
and the local priest is still at the centre of things.
(ROCK MUSIC: "BLUE SUEDE SHOES")
# Blue suede shoes Blue, blue, blue suede shoes... #
This is the All Priest Show.
A highly successful charity fundraiser with a fan club.
They play up to three shows a week and have even toured.
# But lay off my blue suede shoes... #
Father Gary Sullivan learnt guitar at the same school as U2.
Thank you!
Ladies and gentlemen, some of you have seen the All Priests Show before.
You're going to meet all sorts of priests.
We've got fat priests, skinny priests, hairy priests, baldy priests, all sorts.
We usually start by singing a hymn. You can remain seated for this one, Sister.
(LIVELY IRISH MUSIC)
Not all the women of Ireland are happy with the Catholic Church.
Abortion remains illegal here
and, until recently, contraceptives could only be bought on a doctor's prescription.
Tonight is for entertainment, not politics,
and the Church displays an impressive determination to let its hair down.
The doctor says, "Murphy!
"Murphy, I can't diagnose what's wrong with you. It must be the drink."
Murphy says, "All right, Doctor, I'll come back when you're sober."
As a matter of fact, I was born in England.
Went to school in Scotland. Very tired when I got home.
Last time. Let's hear you.
# Sweet Caroline... #
It might have been the Guinness or Sister Eileen,
but I found myself won over with shameful ease.
# I paid the price
# To believe they never would
# Sweet Caroline! # Goodnight, everybody.
# Sweet Caroline! # Have a nice time.
You've been a lovely audience.
# Sweet Caroline! #
Leaving Dublin along the first stretch of public railway to be opened outside England,
William Dargan's Dublin to Kingstown line of 1834.
And by a stroke of luck, on a steam run down to Rosslare -
only this time I have to earn the ride.
There's a knack to this that Fred Astaire would have been proud of.
I can't tell you how old the driver is, but the engine's 71.
For several years she suffered the indignity of being used as a stationary boiler.
Recently rebuilt at a cost of more than £30,000... punts as they have in Ireland,
she was relaunched last year by Mary Robinson, the President.
Nowadays there's no retirement age for steam.
How did you get into doing this?
0ne of the trainee drivers is having second thoughts about his new vocation.
They trained eight of us last year as firemen. Eight young drivers.
So we're fully qualified diesel drivers.
So you're one of the few to survive the course and you hate doing it?
- I hate it. - There's no hope for steam, is there?
After a run along unspoilt coastline through the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains,
we make a slow, triumphant progress through the town of Wexford.
After which our arrival at the Rosslare ferry terminal is a sad anticlimax.
What's more, it's Sunday and from here on Irish Rail is closed.
There's nothing for it but to seek alternative transport.
These boys look privatised.
- Excuse me. - How're you doing?
I'm fine, except...
My plight seems to touch them deeply
and I find myself co-opted to the Harley-Davidson 0wner's Club of Ireland.
As the only Sunday rail service in these parts heads back to Dublin,
I hit the two-lane blacktop heading for Waterford.
(ROCK/IRISH MUSIC)
For some reason, south-east Ireland is a Mecca for bikers.
Though most of my escorts soon get bored, Swifty, Eamon and Mike stay with me.
Under the leather, they seem more Rotary Club than Hell's Angels.
- We're all family men. - Really? What do you do?
I'm a bus driver. I drive for the local bus company here.
So this is a hobby or more serious than that?
It's a way of life.
The Harleys get into your blood and that's it, they're there for good.
And these are no ordinary Hogs.
The one Eamon's riding is an Electraglide in blue, once owned by Sid Vicious.
How much would that be worth now?
About £8,000.
- An investment for the future. - Sure, yes.
- Are you coming with us to Waterford? - Yes. All the way.
True to his name, Swifty's rail replacement service delivers me well ahead of schedule
on the outskirts of Waterford, where the pace changes quite dramatically.
An old chain ferry conveys me at deliciously unfrenzied speed
across the River Blackwater
to an island where the weary traveller can find a modest little B&B.
Waterford Castle, with its layers of history,
seems the place to learn from my genealogist
of his latest piece of detective work.
He's found Brita Gallagher's marriage certificate in Paris.
Neither of her parents were mentioned in it, which is unusual.
He's also located a nest of mid-19th century Gallaghers
recorded as living near the village of Buttevant in north Cork.
It isn't far away and the journey can be done by train.
Going west along the Blackwater valley through Clonmel and Tipperary
to Limerick Junction.
Then south on the Dublin-Cork mainline to Buttevant?
No. No station. It'll have to be Mallow.
There being no train until tomorrow, I have time to visit one of my favourite authors.
For 60 years she's written wickedly comic books about the Anglo-Irish aristocracy
among whom she was brought up.
But things weren't always easy for Molly Keane.
When she started, she had to use a male pseudonym.
In my generation you got a row if you were talking like a servant, sort of thing.
Which has really died out now, but still...
Still...
Most of the boys... Most of the boys of those families
were all sent to public schools in England - Eton if they could afford it, and Harrow.
- The boys got a good education. - The girls got damn all.
- Yes. - There was nothing.
Everything was strictly... There was always the heir.
The girls didn't matter as long as he was all right.
That was very much the way of it.
What sort of things did you write?
I wrote...
I'm sure very sentimental little pieces
about the beauty of the great outdoors and about horses
and about...
Anything. No sex, no love.
Then I discovered my sister having a love affair, I was very jealous aged 17,
and then got shut up in my bed in a state of jealousy,
and thought, "I'll write about life as I know it'll be when I'm a little bit older."
But I never read my books again.
I have a sort of a feeling that it's like that terrible verse in the Bible.
Do you know the verse I mean? It talks about the dog returning to its vomit.
Oh, really? That's always on my mind.
Monday morning on the Tipperary line
and ancestor hunting begins in earnest.
All change here for Mallow and Cork.
This is the longest platform in Ireland.
Not many people know that.
A chap who looked not unlike me said, "My great-granny left from Tralee."
He made his prediction with so much conviction, the BBC paid him to see.
(ANN0UNCER) Train now arriving on platform one
serves Charleville, Mallow and Cork
with a connection at Mallow for Banteer, Millstreet, Rathmore, Killarney...
(PALIN) This is the fastest service on Irish Rail,
connecting Dublin with the second biggest city, Cork, in 2.5 hours.
Unlike most things in Ireland, it's marketed not for its past, but its future.
- Afternoon. - Hello, sir.
- Would you like a set of headphones? - I'll have everything you've got, yes!
OK. First, I'd like to tell you about the seat.
These seats are adjustable for your comfort.
Also here at the table console we have a light.
- And there's a light up above here. - I came to Ireland to get away from this.
She even offered me a fax machine, but I don't know... I suppose I'm old fashioned.
Hello, Tom? Yes. I'm speeding into the heart of Gallagher territory.
Thanks for sending the material. I got it in the hotel in Waterford.
Yeah. The Palin-Gallagher stuff.
We're going down to Mallow
and then I'm going to check Buttevant out and villages round there
because north Cork seems good hunting ground for the Gallagher connection.
This is not a tourist-board film or a street in Disneyland.
It's Buttevant, and it proves that everything you heard about Ireland is true.
I've been told I can't miss the local historian - he runs the filling station.
And the local shop.
- I'm looking for Tony O'Neill's bar. - Just through there.
Thanks.
And the pub.
- Tony O'Neill? - That's right. You're in the right place.
Good. You've got a bit of everything here. Filling station, grocery store, bar.
(TONY) In the old days we did better than that because outside there was a bakery.
Was this the bakery for the whole village?
No. There were several more small bakers at that time.
There were no major bakers around the area.
Each town had its own self-contained bakeries.
- How far are we going back here? - We're going back to 1901-1902.
Actually, I need your help because I'm looking for the local graveyard.
I'll be delighted to show you the way. I'll take you there.
- Thank you very much. - But first...
- Can I send you up a lovely pint? - First things first.
- Look after the living. - Slàinte.
Slàinte.
Buttevant churchyard yielded no Gallaghers.
They were either buried elsewhere or were too poor to afford a decent tombstone.
It's a fine church.
It is. There's a very interesting thing about the church.
As you see that steeple in the background,
it is actually the steeple that created the word "steeplechase".
Two gentlemen named O'Callaghan and Blake,
believing to have the two best hunters in the country, had a wager
as to who would reach the steeple of the St Leger church in Doneraile first.
And from just outside the fence here
they took off over 4.5 miles of very rough country.
First obstacle the old river flowing fast, ravine down and up,
but they were prepared for this challenge... and they made the trip.
They both survived and O'Callaghan won the challenge.
And, as you can now see, the famous word "steeplechase" -
a chase from the steeple of St John's in Buttevant
to the St Leger Church in Doneraile - was born.
Tony's comprehensive knowledge of... everything
points me to a village called Glanworth, 20 miles away.
Here I found the name I was looking for.
Gallaghers who died in the 1820s.
They could have been Brita's family, but there's no way of knowing.
My ancestor remains frustratingly elusive.
In fact, the closer I get, the more the options widen.
Back at Buttevant, the shadows lengthen and the evening's sport begins.
This is the ancient and lethal game of road bowling.
Basically, all you need is banknotes, bowlers...
a 28-ounce cast-iron ball and a road.
Bets are laid as to which team can get their ball three miles up the road quickest.
That's a grand ball!
It's not quite the Royal & Ancient,
but an appreciative gallery of bar-room bowlers follows the action.
They even have stewards in crested blazers. This is serious stuff.
That's one of the marks now and his partner is throwing from this mark.
- That's where the first throw came to rest. - It would be a relatively poor throw.
- It's not a great throw. - What's the distance to the other throw?
- 100 yards or so. - No, no. It's only about 50 metres or so.
No one seems to be worried about closing the road.
It's like holding Wimbledon in Piccadilly Circus.
(EXCITED SHOUTING)
With the right technique and use of the camber,
bowlers like Christy can throw 250 metres or more.
- What's the skill needed? - A flick of the wrist.
Not necessarily the swing of the arm. It's just a flick of the wrist, really.
- Do you spin it? - Exactly, yeah.
From the palm of your hand, you spin the ball.
- How did you learn? - At a very young age.
- Did your father play? - He did, yes.
It was always in the family. That's the whole thing, to start when you're young.
We'd better get out of the way.
As I follow the crowd on this long summer evening,
I have the oddest sensation that no time has passed
and it could be Brita Gallagher beside me.
This is all that remains of the old Tralee & Dingle Light Railway.
It runs across two miles of reclaimed marshland to Blenneville,
where stands a windmill -
the last thing that millions of emigrants saw of their country.
Blenneville is the most westerly station in Ireland.
Truly the end of the line.
Today, parties of schoolchildren descend on the Heritage Centre
where a wholesome present tries vainly to recapture the grim realities of the past.
Between 1845 and 1851,
1.5 million people left Ireland.
18% of the population.
From a land devastated by famine, they took to the oceans in conditions so filthy
that the vessels were often known as "coffin ships".
My great-grandmother was among them.
I looked through the Blenneville passenger lists in vain.
They're not all complete - some are in Cork or Derry or Limerick.
Many more are held in the ports of entry.
And she may never have been recorded.
At least by coming to Buttevant and Blenneville,
I can imagine how it might have been
and what she might have seen as she left her homeland 140 years ago.
For now, it's back to Tralee and home.
I've found what remains of the railways of Ireland,
but I've still to find Brita Gallagher.
That journey's only just beginning.