CULTURE NIGHT COLLOQUY – HOME PLACE PERSPECTIVES SHARED IN PEACE CAMPUS SETTING
PETER HUGHES
Questions of Border and Monaghan identity were posed by Gráinne McElwain and answered by novelist Pat McCabe, businesswoman Janette Maxwell and Monaghan Co Council Chief Executive Robert Burns during a panel discussion at an event in the Peace Campus in Monaghan Town on Friday night which saw the relaunch of the Monaghan-Dublin Business Network (Photo: Rory Geary).
With Co Monaghan’s entrepreneurial culture foregrounded in the main business of the evening, this Culture Night gathering concluded with musings on other aspects of the signifiers of being from Monaghan and from the Border region. While the Border and the events that shaped it gave him an awareness as a small child of “the impermanence of things”, Pat McCabe’s recollections of the Clones of his youth were more focused on the social magnets of “dance halls, little jazz bands and the cinema” and the sense of Clones as “an incredibly vital place”, a place where scholarship was very important in the local schools. “I was never really away,” was Magheracloone man Robert Burns’ response to being asked what it had felt like to return to his native county to take up the local authority’s leading role. Pride in place distinguished his contributions: “I think this is a great county – there is so much that is possible, so much that we have achieved and so much more that we can still do.” The “whole host of opportunities” on offer to someone growing up in Monaghan in the 1980s and 1990s stuck in the mind of Grant Thornton’s Janette Maxwell….
