Denzil McDaniel: First they took out homes, now the rest of a town’s heart is under threat

The accompanying message said: “The heart went out of Enniskillen town when the houses on the island were replaced with car parks and businesses.”

It’s a sentiment I agree 100 per cent with, and not just for nostalgic reasons of remembering the times I walked from Cornagrade, the estate I was born in, down past the streets on my way with my parents to get chips or ice cream in The Derby, or on the way to the Broadmeadow to watch my older cousins playing football.

The changes to my home town over my lifetime have been immense; some good, some bad.

What strikes me now is the thought that people in positions of responsibility make decisions which have repercussions away into the future, and many of those changes have had awful negative effects on our community.

Don’t get me wrong. Some change is good, and indeed a lot of the development in Enniskillen has been great and improved the town dramatically. Other change is often necessary due to the need to adapt to changing circumstances.

We’ve seen this week, the announcement of the closure of the Bank of Ireland in Lisnaskea and the end of St. Mary’s School, Brollagh. These seem almost inevitable given developments, but are they for the good of the local communities there?

Personally, I don’t think so, and I’ll return to that later.

But back to the streets in Enniskillen, that particular area nicknamed 'The Dardenelles' after the area in Gallipoli where many men from Enniskillen perished in the First World War.

By the time I was growing up in Enniskillen, many of the houses in Dame Street, Abbey Street and so on were in appalling condition and it was right that they were demolished to allow redevelopment that would allow people to live in better homes. But they should have kept people in new homes on the island town.

It wasn’t just those streets either. I can recall a lot of homes around the town; magnificent houses beside the Castle at Wellington Place that I remember had seen better days when hundreds of people lived there, and houses down at the Broadmeadow where KFC etc are now beside the football pitch at the Lakeland Forum. Houses at Paget Square, roughly at the back of Gordon’s Chemist.

I recall a lot of these homes were cleared to make way for the throughpass road and the 'new bridge' going out towards Henry Street and the Sligo Road. I say 'new' because when I was going into town from Portora, the only way was across the one bridge that was there leading into Ann Street.

The development of roads and car parks was absolutely necessary as the ownership of cars and traffic increased exponentially; but in their wisdom the decision makers decided to move virtually all the residents out of town and into estates on the outskirts, like Coleshill, Kilmacormick and Hillview.

I was at the funeral of the mother of a good friend when the priest recalled that her husband was born and reared in the town and when he was moved to Hillview, he felt it was like moving out into the country!

The double whammy, of course, was that as the Troubles took hold, Protestant and Catholics were further segregated into their own estates, but thankfully for the most part at least, there was still a good relationship between the people of Enniskillen.

The net effect of all this was that Enniskillen, once a bustling residential town centre with thousands of residents, was now more or less a commercial centre.

The late Joan Trimble, former owner of the Impartial Reporter, used to tell me about her father, Egbert’s time as editor when he would walk from the office up home and pick up plenty of stories for the paper from the dozens of residents he met on the way.

By the 1970s, partly due to the Troubles, Enniskillen closed at 6pm and someone once remarked if you walked through the town in the evenings you could hear the echo of your own footsteps.

There have, of course, been many great developments.

When I started working in the Impartial Reporter in 1973, there was no Lakeland Forum. The Broadmeadow, where the main Forum 3G pitch is now, was a grass pitch with a grandstand and I recall in August the show-jumping would take place with heavy horses ruining the pitch for the start of the football season.

There were no big supermarkets, Wellworth’s at the Diamond being the big shop to complement the smaller grocery shops like O’Reilly’s in Townhall Street, SR Elliott’s in Darling Street or the one in East Bridge Street run by Miss Chambers and, er, the other Miss Chambers!

No Dunnes, the site was occupied by the Mart where the farmers brought their cattle every Thursday. No Tesco, it was a football pitch until 1980 where I played for Enniskillen Rangers, no Asda which was the old Kent Plastics factory and before that Taylor Woods employing hundreds over the years.

And certainly no Erneside.

There have been many positive changes in Enniskillen, but sometimes change and development comes at a price as Lisnaskea and Brollagh are about to find out.

Internet banking is a great facility, paying bills, checking your account and doing your banking at the push of a button.

But, communities are paying for it with fewer and fewer bank branches, which means hardly any face to face contact, and while it’s very handy to put a card into a machine at any time to get cash out it seems more and more of them are now actually charging us to get our own money.

And the rush in education to have more and more schools centralised means the closure of schools around the county.

The controlled post-primary sector over the years, which is mostly attended by Protestants used to have high schools in Lisnaskea, Kesh and Ballinamallard, as well as two grammar schools in Enniskillen.

Now, every pupil has to come to Enniskillen to attend either Devenish or Enniskillen Royal.

Which all begs the question what is a town or village any more? They used to be centres of population, often with their own post office, bank, school and shops.

In short, a community of local people with a pride in their place. Towns should be all about people.

It has to be said that Enniskillen remains a beautiful place and a wonderful town, due in no small measure to the many businesses fighting for survival.

But as Iain Kennedy and Reggie Ferguson have highlighted in recent weeks in this paper, the town faces an uncertain future.

I do not support the proposal for a major development at the Unipork site.

I do get that it will bring investment to the area and that people want the business and other facilities being proposed.

But the siting of it there will only put more serious pressure on the town centre and the Erneside, so something will have to go to the wall.

And besides, there is plenty of space in Enniskillen, Toppings old site is substantial, the South West College is about to be vacated and so on.

What we need are people with vision in positions of responsibility; someone to draw up a ten-year plan which would bring residential and commercial life back into our county town.

We have in the past been let down by planners and developers who stripped housing and its residents out of Enniskillen, we should not now allow them to strip out all the business life. What would be left of our historic town then?