“The Ghost Duffy”!

Interviewer: Joe tell us a little bit of the some of the smuggling stories that you remember or that you know of or that you’ve been told about by friends and family. I know you’ve had quite a few of them there. I’m minded about your brother who had his Rolo taken off him a few years later but in 1923 when the customs posts started to come into being after partition and so on. Those customs posts of course had different opening hours north and south.

Joe: The British customs were open from eight o’clock in the morning until five o’clock at night then they closed down. The Irish customs posts they would open in morning. If you wanted to cross the border in your car, you would’ve had to get a bailsman to bond you to get a pass to go across the border. Actually, I think the full details of that is in the museum in Enniskillen, the type of book you needed and that sort of thing. It was an interesting period, but we grew up with it, we accepted it.

Interviewer: Tell us how Mr Duffy got his nickname.

Joe: “The Ghost Duffy”! He lived between Garrison and Belcoo, along the border up there. He was smuggling cattle one night and this policeman was on the scene, and he seized the cattle. Duffy got on his bicycle and cycled over the mountain into Enniskillen and booked into a lady who kept lodgers for the night. When the case came up in Belleek Courthouse, it was over the RUC barracks that we mentioned earlier, up on the top floor. He was put there, so the evidence was given and this lady from Enniskillen gave the genuine true evidence that Mr Duffy had sent the night in her house, and he couldn’t possibly have been there, so the case was dismissed. So, somebody asked the policeman “are you sure it was Duffy you seen”, “well if it wasn’t him, it was his ghost!”. I knew Duffy and I knew his daughter, I used to fix bicycles for them.

You see during the economic war in the 1930s when De Valera, when the big landowners in the Free State, the people were given the right to buy their farms and all and De Valera stopped sending the money over to England, England then refused to take the cattle from Ireland over. A bullock that was worth £20 could be bought in the Free State for £5 and was smuggled across then where it was worth £20. At that time, £15 was a lot of money then and there were people who made a lot of money.

Another bit of Irish humour, you had Myles Sweeney who lived in my time, he was caught by the Free State authorities smuggling cattle and he opted to be tried not in the district court but in the county court by a judge and jury. If you can imagine a jury of Leitrim men were not going to find one of their mates guilty and he was found innocent, and his cattle returned to him.

Interviewer: You have to know the system.

Joe: If you know the system. He was a character.

Interviewer: So, Duffy was known as “Ghost Duffy”?

Joe: Duffy was known as “Ghost Duffy”, that was how he got his name. I knew him fairly well.

Interviewer: It wasn’t just the men it was the women too did some of the smuggling. There’s a lovely story you have about a time a lady who had a guesthouse in Bundoran.

Joe: That’s right, she was from a very strong Republican family, she was a native of Dungannon. At that time, they would’ve travelled by train. When the GNR was going you could get a six o’clock train from Belleek in the morning to take you to either Dublin or Belfast, do a full day’s business and be back in Belleek at nine o’clock at night. She would travel from Bundoran up to Cookstown and the poor old dear she kept one of these crockery hot water bottles to keep her warm. The customs men inspected these trains at the Belleek border, the British customs and would’ve seen an old lady with a hot water bottle. When she got up to Dungannon, the hot water bottle was full of whiskey. It was emptied out and dried out and filled up full of tea, which was very scarce in the Free State, so the hot water bottle was filled with the tea leaves and smuggled back. Again, can you beat the Irish to find a solution for a system?!

Interviewer: I love the story of Thady John have I got it right?

Joe: Thady John McGlone. He had one of these engines you put on the back wheel of a bicycle to an ordinary push bike. He had to have somebody to cross the border to act as bailsman for him to ensure that he would renew the pass every twelve months. The time came then the engine had given trouble so Thady John got someone from the Irish customs to cancel it and he put the bits of the thing in a bag and said, “there you are, there’s your engine you can do what you like with it”.