A thousand people gathered last night to celebrate the 20th anniversaryof a Maze prison breakout, writes Kathy Sheridan from Letterkenny.
A cordon at the entrance to the Holiday Inn signified this was not any old supper dance. The heavy-set lads with the number one haircuts, earpieces and black suits were grim but cordial. "Have you business? What brings you here?" they asked.
"What's it to you?" I demanded in turn. Well, no, I didn't. There were 19 others just like him, hovering, all employed by Sinn Féin. And none of them would have been necessary if the media had not "hyped" up the affair all week, everyone agreed.
The media was probably to blame for the earlier bomb scare too, said a senior hotel employee, plaintively. Bomb scare? "Ah, it happened this evening but there was no code word or stuff like that. The police didn't seem to think it was too serious."
Earlier, when asked what the intensive security was all about, four members of the hotel bar staff replied, separately and straight-faced, that it was "for The Wolfe Tones".
Official or Provisional wing? asked a wag. A youth who was hardly born in 1983 and dressed to party, said coincidentally, that he too was here to see The Wolfe Tones, "to see them celebrate the miracle escape from Long Kesh".
Sinn Féin councillor, Pearse Doherty, was five-years-old in 1983: "This is about informing people about what was a very defining moment for us." No-one, he insisted, had suggested that there was anything distasteful about it - except the media.
Still, it would be an odd kind of media that failed to register a festive gathering of 1,000 hardy-looking republicans, paying €30 to have a simple, shirt-sleeved, knees-up on the 20th anniversary of a spectacular if rather contentious prison breakout.
But how long a period should pass before it becomes decent to transfer clearly-remembered events from the current affairs file to the history section? Party people travelling to Letterkenny via Emyvale, Co Monaghan, must have noticed the signpost for Bragan, one of the loneliest places on earth, where gardaí are still digging for the body of 17-year-old Columba McVeigh. Fresh bitterness has been generated by the recently-published picture of four Sinn Féin TDs posing with the killers of Detective Jerry McCabe.
The Ulster Unionist MP, Jeffrey Donaldson, has registered his disgust at the "inappropriateness" of the Letterkenny celebration, "given that a prison officer lost his life" [the man died of a heart attack after being stabbed, although a judge concluded that he could not be satisfied that the heart attack was the result of being stabbed] "and others were left wounded and deeply traumatised".
Would it not be more judicious to allow some events to fade quietly into history? Gerry Kelly (who put a non-fatal bullet through the head of a warder during the breakout) shrugged genially: "Should 1916 be left to history? Should Colditz be left to history? Should the world wars be left to history? I don't understand the question."
If anything, he seemed rather puzzled by some people's failure to understand why 1,000 people (at least) might be so excited by the Maze breakout. "Most people like an escape . . . I enjoy Colditz stuff. In Thatcher's own words, this was the biggest penal crisis in British history . . ."
But he is prepared to accept that some might find this function contentious: "Yes, we've been accused of that by Jeffrey Donaldson. But I can't walk out of the house without it being an affront to Jeffrey Donaldson. This is in Ireland, not in the north . . . With respect to the press, I didn't ask you to come here."
As for the rest of Ireland, he has no complaints. While he was on the run, he recalled, "I stayed in the house of every party in Ireland, except Unionists . . . Labour, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin . . . they hid us and fed us for months".
And in case we still didn't get it: "This is an underdog story," he added.
And so they adjourned to the cold-meat salad and hot plate buffet, to hear three old lags - Kelly, Brendan McFarlane and Bobby Storey - "have a bit of crack on the stage", reminiscing on the glory of that glorious day in September, when, as another attendee put it, "the smirk was wiped from Maggie Thatcher's puss".
And afterwards to join Derek Warfield and his branch of The Wolfe Tones with, of course, the anthem of the night: The Men Behind the Wire.