Sunday morning in Nutts Corner and Jonesboro is a tale of two markets - only 50 miles apart, substantially similar, yet strikingly different. The law cramps one but flirts discreetly with the other, writes Fionnuala O'Connor.
Even when the sun shines Nutts Corner is short on magic, yet cars stream to it weekly across the charmless landscape around Belfast's international airport. The site, a disused 1950s airfield, is as decrepit as some of the wares. Traders can't disguise goods that spend too much time in the rain: cans of paint stained with damp take the shine off authentic country offerings like duck eggs and potatoes.
Jonesboro by contrast is cheerful, especially on a sunny day, a village in a beautiful setting - though the Border is yards away, and black memories as close. A lingering British army post looks down the hill to where two RUC officers were ambushed and killed in 1989 by the IRA, as they drove home from Dundalk Garda station.
Memorials on a stone wall push the context further back: one to a local IRA man killed in 1975 "on active service" a few miles into the North, another to two children "shot dead by British troops" in 1922.
But the market has a cheeky sort of charm, an open-faced illegality. This is a borderland that has scratched a living in the margins of two jurisdictions for almost a century. No wonder it is policed with discretion, whereas Nutts Corner on Belfast's outer fringe has been raided so often that cigarettes and booze have disappeared, and the CD and DVD pirates have gone underground.
One regular misses them. "The most you'd see these days is a guy walking about in a big coat, Harpo Marx style," he says. "Opens it like a flasher and there they are, Playstation game CDs, three for a tenner." Few bargains left now in Nutts Corner, he claims.
Jonesboro still has some. Park round the corner from the market proper, and the first thing you see in a makeshift car-park is long trestles covered in cheap cigarettes, bottles of wines and spirits. Within a few minutes several big family cars pull up: bulk packs of cigarettes are handed through the windows.
On the main market site "The Carphoney Warehouse" copies the original's blue sign to perfection. At another busy stall pirated computer software, diverse and ingenious, includes a programme offering ways to pick locks, "as used by locksmiths".
Nearby a cardboard notice offers "Adult Films, just ask". But the intent men inspecting the software seem immune.
Unlike the suggestion at Nutts Corner of an encampment pitched in haste with someone doing lookout, Jonesboro has a permanent look, as befits a concern at least partly funded from official purses. The custom-built hall at the centre, with its solid roof, small café and toilets was opened by the then chairman of the International Fund for Ireland, a plaque announces, with funding from the Department of Agriculture, the International Fund and Europe.
The stalls nearest the plaque are impeccably respectable but another carries DVDs of The Passion of the Christ and Kill Bill 2, covers slightly blurred, Uma Thurman even more elongated than on screen.
People are dressed much the same as in the northern market. There is some identical stuff for sale: plants, garden gnomes, heaps of pink plastic games and toys, burgers and hotdogs, the same poster of 1920s labourers eating their lunch on a girder high above Manhattan, Marilyn Monroe in a see-through shirt. Plus, in Jonesboro, Michael Collins in various poses and a tinted sketch of the GPO interior on that 1916 weekend.
The plants are better in Nutts Corner, stall after stall with knowledgeable traders and well-kept greenery, the market's star turn. A hillbilly family made of wickerwork is a variant on the gnomes.
In spite of its drabness, Nutts Corner has nothing as ugly as the centrepiece of Jonesboro's gnome-display: a plaster gent in pinstripes, soiled trousers in elaborate folds round his ankles. Except, perhaps, the baby's bib with the slogan "Born to shit on the Garvaghy Road".
Both markets presumably aim to deter police interest: republican and loyalist content is scarce. The "Proud to be a Prod" bib stall is festooned in Union Jacks, but the t-shirt stalls feature the same four-letter words as in Jonesboro, where there are far more Marilyns and Liverpool football shirts than Michael Collins.
If you want to, you can find CDs of IRA-glorifying sessions in a "shebeen in Creggan".
They look like minority taste. Outside the gates, three young people attract little attention as they shake a collecting tin for "IRA prisoners of war".
Even here, the IRA, ostensibly "real", turns out to be counterfeit, like the DVDs of The Passion of the Christ.