By Barry Sheppard

Approximately 35km southwest of the hustle, bustle and mind-altering tourist attractions of the city of Amsterdam lies the much smaller and quieter university city of Leiden.  And for me it is a homecoming of sorts, for it was twelve years to the day that I, along with approximately twenty other fine upstanding young men and women from the four corners of Ireland, made picturesque and historic stretch of land our home for those hot summer months.  Today though, I’m part of a much smaller yet equally fine and upstanding party getting ready to take in the familiar sites of the place I called home for a short time.

Although I have been back in the Netherlands on several occasions since the glorious summer of 2000 it is the first time I have decided to venture back to this location, and departing through the train station front doors the first thing to grab my attention is the pristine four story building to my left where formerly stood a large bricks and mortar brightly covered canvas for a commune of artistic punk types who called it home.  As the vast majority of buildings throughout the centre of Leiden are of that unmistakable tall and thin Dutch style the gang of punk’s squat should really have looked out of place.  But now that it appears to be no more, this monument to modernity which has taken its place looks decidedly out of step.   However, I am not prepared to let the demise of a building I never set foot into spoil this walk down memory lane.

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Markets have been something of a theme on Under a Grey Sky in recent weeks. Thanks to Barry Sheppard for his exploration of the St George’s indoor market in Belfast:

St George’s is situated in the south east corner of Belfast city centre, a stone’s throw away from the relatively recently redeveloped waterfront area.  I know it is a stone’s throw away because many a stone has been thrown in this general area over the years.  However, on a relatively sunny Sunday morning in a more placid era the cycle from home to the market is a somewhat more pleasant experience.

The market is well over 100 years old, having been commissioned by The Belfast Corporation in 1890 and completed in three stages by 1896.  The market is one of my oldest and fondest memories of Belfast.  In the very early 80s I remember quite vividly being brought to the market by my mother and being amazed by the sheer size, smells and colours of the place.  What amazed me most of all was the swarm of strange and unusual faces, not that there was anything Picasso-esque about Belfast people in those days.  It was just exciting as a four year old to see that many people in the one place towering over me going about their business.  The place was a great spot for people watching, a pastime that I’m still partial to today.

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Just outside the Friedrichstraße station is a simple building that – when I first came to Berlin – housed a nightclub called “Tränenpalast”… Palace of Tears. The name came from its former function, as the border departure hall for people travelling from East to West Berlin. The doors of this pavilion would have been last point of goodbye, as western visitors headed back across the border that split the city in two, and left their family and friends behind.

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By Barry Sheppard:

The town of Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary, is what can be described as a typical rural one-street Irish town in the ancient province of Munster.  It straddles the invisible county border of North Tipperary and Co. Offaly and is situated only several kilometres away from what was the centre of the world for about an hour almost exactly one year ago when a man named Obama came to drink Guinness and tread the footsteps of his ancestors.   Shortly before he embarked on that Irish-American vote clocking journey to Moneygall I embarked on a similar one to Cloughjordan to view the land of my forefathers.   Armed with a camera and a quest for my own personal history I embarked on the 714 mile round trip from Belfast, which inexplicably took me through Limerick, to the small town of Cloughjordan.   Disembarking from the train with slightly less fanfare than the ‘leader of the free world’ I walked a further kilometre to reach the town and on that pleasant spring day it was easy to see why its most famous inhabitant, the poet and revolutionary Thomas MacDonagh, once described it as a place ‘in calm of middle country’.

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Barry Sheppard looks back on the town he grew up in, and reflects on the stories you can discover in the places that you thought you knew so well…

When I was told the name ‘Under a Grey Sky’, only one thought popped into my head; home. Growing up in Lurgan there were plenty of grey skies overhead.  I’m not saying it was dull, grey and boring – although it was at times like that – it is merely a passing comment on the usual state of the weather in that part of Ireland.  For the sake of clarity I should point out there are several town lands of Lurgan in Ireland, one in Co. Galway, one in Co. Mayo and one in Co. Cavan.   The Lurgan I spent the first nineteen years of my life is situated in Co. Armagh in the often disputed six north-eastern counties of Ireland.  For those who don’t know, the name Lurgan is the anglicised re-branding of the original Gaelic name an Lorgain which means ‘the long ridge’.

In the nineteen years I spent in Lurgan before departing its designated electoral boundaries, I can honestly say that not much out of the ordinary really happened.   Some may dispute this or say I have lightly glossed over the previous number of decades of conflict, but to that I would say that for my generation that was the ordinary.   Anyway, back to the long ridge.  In the norm people did the everyday things as they do everywhere; school, jobs, marriages, pub and bookies, and not always in that order.  It seems that it was the normal drill since time immemorial, or since the plantations.  It would be fair to say that there were not many who thought too hard about the history of their surroundings.

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