06/09/2026
It was late August in 1969 and Northern Ireland was on the boil. The smouldering resentment of decades had burst into open, uncontrollable flames. Pillars of smoke reached up to the clouds from bombed-out businesses. Bullets angrily tore at the curtain of darkness that fell a little earlier every autumn evening.
In the relative tranquillity of the countryside outside Crossmaglen, I was packing and preparing for the big move. After eleven years in the nest, I was leaving home. My new abode was to be Saint Colman’s College, Violet Hill, Newry, County Down. I felt a sense of real achievement, having passed the 11+ exam that opened the door of a ‘Grammar School’ to me and that paid for my tuition and boarding.
Our teacher in primary school had invited some of us to write poems on our last day there. My poem was somewhat triumphalist. I felt very self-satisfied that my habit of reading books had paid off, even if I had sometimes risked my eyesight by holding the book at arm’s length, reading in the shaft of light that came from the kitchen and lit up the space between the beds in the ‘low’ room. In my valedictory poem I wrote of how people had told me I was a ‘fool’ for my bookishness but now I felt vindicated as I rhymed lyrically about my imminent departure for ‘secondary school’.
My older brother was already at the school so he was able to brief me on the necessities of life as a boarder. I needed bed-sheets, blankets and a rug. My clothes had to be labelled and I was introduced to the new-fangled concept of a laundry-bag. I packed a steel comb. They were very fashionable then, as were polo-necked, two-tone sweaters and long, undisciplined, shapeless hair-‘styles’. I took some ‘Marvel’ dried milk and a ‘Variety’ box of cereals; some apples, plain biscuits and cheese; sugar, jam and savoury sandwich spreads; some eggs; a bottle of ‘diluting’ orange and a plastic mug. I felt secure in my achievements, in my preparation and in the company of my brother as my family loaded up the Morris Oxford car and set out on the cork-screw road, through Silverbridge and Camlough to Newry.
The lights of Newry Town, as it then was, formed an arc in the valley that holds it, like a crescent moon that had fallen on its back. We drove down from the mountainous approach of Camlough and Bessbrook, over the twin arteries of Newry Canal and the Clanrye River and up Canal Street to the imposing entrance gates, lodge-house and avenue of Violet Hill. The bishop’s house was signposted to the left, a little off the avenue and hidden by the ‘Bishop’s Wood’. The college was red-brick with Newry Granite quoins. It was built sidelong into a sharp hill. The grounds were spacious, with stepped lawns on the hill-side and playing fields in the valley. Inside, it was an imposing building with high ceilings and large, framed portraits of serious-looking clergymen on the walls. This was ‘the house’ and it was my new home. I was shown to the room that I had to share with my brother and another set of brothers from Kilkeel. I got the bottom bunk and the older of both sets of brothers claimed the top ones. I unpacked my larder into the stale shelves of a locker that smelled of generations of apples and I hung up my new clothes on the rail in the other side.
The following day was taken up with introducing first years, or ‘scaldies’ in the terminology of the house, to the routines of college life and of boarding-school. We were given book-lists, time-tables, and class allocations. I was very happy to be placed in J.1.A. - Junior House, First-year, A-stream.
The excitement of day one was a little dulled by a sickness in my gut. I felt queasy and light-headed and I winced from the shooting pains that threatened to double me up. I fainted and had to be removed to my room. I was diagnosed as suffering from a combination of home-sickness, travel-sickness and over-excitement. The nun who looked after the medical needs of the house had a heart full of kindness but she betrayed none of it in her look or manner or in her initial interview with a potential patient. When the seriousness or authenticity of the case warranted it, she allowed her soft centre to emerge from the shell-like exterior that was wrapped in her white habit. I did not quite convince her of the seriousness of my illness however, so I was given no more than the standard remedies for stomach upsets and headaches. The coffee-coloured liquid medicine was known to us as ‘Boka-Cola’ and the Solpadine tablet types were ‘Cartwheels’.
In the small hours of the following day a doctor was called as I was feverish and obviously ill. A missionary priest, Fr Reid, who was temporarily on the teaching staff of the college convinced others that I was not malingering. He had been recently expelled from Nigeria in the upheaval that we came to know as the Biafran War. He may have saved my life. The local doctor, Doctor McVerry, father to the famous Fr McVerry, campaigner on homelessness, diagnosed appendicitis and ordered me to Daisy Hill hospital immediately. The priest took me there in the back of his ‘Mini’ van with a cardboard box for a pillow. We had to detour through Bessbrook. Newry was on fire and I was delirious with fever.
On entering the hospital and getting basic details sorted out, the priest took me aside to a small room and calling me by my official first name, Gabriel, he asked me if I wanted to go to confession. I decided that since he was asking me, then I better confess and on finishing, the priest took a small silver box from his pocket, which I now know is called a pyx, opened it and gave me Holy Communion. ‘This is it’, I thought. My first day at secondary school, and I felt sure it was about to be my last.
The drama wasn’t over. The hospital needed permission to operate so I was asked for a contact for my parents. My father worked for the local publican/undertaker, Michael McConville, so I gave him my father’s work number, not realising that by now it was in the wee, small hours of the morning.
My uncle and namesake, Michael Murtagh, had died six months previously, ‘from a wettin,’ that gave rise to pleurisy. I had visited him in the Louth Hospital, viewing him through a window, in an early version of social distancing. The undertaker set out to tell my parents that I was in hospital and about to be operated on. He managed to rouse my father from sleep and told him, ‘Michael is in hospital and they need your permission to operate on him’. My father shook his sleepy head and said, ‘Sure, Michael is dead. Didn’t you bury him a few months ago’!
