Last summer, if there was one, I brought a cousin from Northampton over to Brookeborough.

We’ve the same great-grandfather, who hailed from the emigration hotbed of County Mayo.

That man, James Gallagher, fought for the British Army against the Boers in South Africa.

Then, a few years after coming home to Swinford, he fought for Irish Republicans against the British.

Though he never spoke of anything to do with that War of Independence, if you read up on history, some of the most effective guerrilla attacks in that fight came in the Swinford area.

So in a roundabout way, the Boers contributed to Irish independence.

James Gallagher too reputedly ended up with two pensions: one from the British Army, and one from the Irish Army, which he later served in.

Mind you, despite his two pensions, he headed into the weekend with only the price of a plug of tobacco.

According to my grandmother, that veteran of two armies ended his days under autocratic rule – by the wife.

Then again, they say you should never believe a woman when she’s telling stories about her mother-in-law.

(Disclaimer – for my own mother’s benefit – except when Sarah, my wife, is saying nice things, as always.)

Seriously though, James Gallagher of Swinford had an extraordinary life, for a man who was also just a plain shopkeeper.

Sadly though, the Ireland he dreamed of never quite materialised.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, his children – and then especially his grandchildren – left the shores of Ireland.

My own grandfather spent time in North London. Sometimes I think that if he’d stayed there, I might have been one of those second- or third-generation Irish, like Shane McGowan, or Harry Kane.

I might even have ended up as a poster on Tottenham fan Denzil McDaniel’s wall!

But as it was, my grandfather came back to the Fermanagh/Tyrone borders – that bit which until recently was held under as much of a Post Office injustice as the Horizon scandal.

Yes, those parts that were on the Fermanagh side, but assigned a Tyrone postal address.

Paradoxically, my grandfather’s brother stayed in Swinford, where he ran the family business.

Yet all his children emigrated to England, settling down in London to begin with, and then spreading their wings.

That’s how this particular cousin grew up in England, considering himself as Irish as anyone born on the island across the water.

His father even ran an Irish Centre up in the English Midlands.

And the reason I’m setting all this context out is to show how savvy he should be on Irish politics.

And he is; very ‘awake’ to what’s going on in the world.

But on the first evening in Brookeborough, I brought him to the village’s finest viewing point.

Anyone who’s taken the bus from Enniskillen to Belfast probably thinks I’m talking about the old quarry on the outskirts of town.

But no – this viewing point has no rocks or brambles to clamber across. It’s a place called The Forest Inn, up by the woodlands on the edge of town, which you can see through the police-car style windows.

Added to that, you’ve got a view of Brookeborough’s Boer War memorial.

A 3-D view maybe, since we might all choose to look at it in different ways.

Best of all, there’s a picture of Shane McGowan up on the wall to unite singers, drinkers and second-generation Irish person together as one.

So we settled down by the window in the lounge, looking out on the narrow roads that lead to a lot of very big history.

In one direction you’ve Colebrooke; in another, Brookeborough Gaelic football grounds.

It’s a lovely half-summery evening, played out in pool matches and pints sunk faithfully at the bar.

And then my cousin says to me: “I suppose nobody would mention religion here.”

Well, no, actually, I thought. The punters are probably more interested in the bar staff giving out beer and wine than Eucharistic wafers.

But at the same time, there’s an awful lot revealed in that question.

Ever since, or even before, the days of Winston Churchill’s famous quote about the “dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”, the English have reduced Ireland’s problems to a sectarian squabble.

It is almost as if they might picture The Forest Inn as a place where two auld fellows are sitting at the bar sipping the black stuff.

Let’s call them Bob and Charlie, up on high stools, having their spake.

All of a sudden, Bob says something about scripture, and the place erupts into a war zone, with pool balls thrown, and a dozen customers diving for cover behind the poker machines.

The whole thing gets so out of hand, there’s even a war of words about “Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey”. Superintendent Ted Hastings has to be called to float up the Erne in a bubble.

Hopefully by the time he gets there from Enniskillen, he’s able to bring some ecumenical calm.

It’s beyond the call of duty for any innkeeper to manage fights about Joseph, Mary and the wee donkey.

Obviously, such a situation seems absurd. But we are dealing with a reality where even the most knowledgeable of English people know very little about what’s actually happened in Irish history.

Just before Christmas, news broke of Princess Diana having “obvious ignorance of or disregard for” the constitutional position of Northern Ireland.

According to revelations by the Irish ambassador of the time, she didn’t know the difference between the North and the Republic.

What’s staggering is that this was 1993. She’d actually already been to Derry-Londonderry in 1991, visiting British Army regiments.

And most likely she didn’t even know what she was doing there.

Though from speaking to some ex-soldiers, I’m not sure they did, either.

So maybe all this proves the truth in what Roy Greenslade wrote in a 2019 article*, ‘The Belfast blindspot’.

Northern Ireland’s realities pass “under the radar of Britain’s press” with their role portrayed as that of “reluctant piggy in the middle between two warring Irish religious tribes”.

Therefore, in answer to the question, ‘Do the English know anything much about Ireland?’, the sad fact is that they don’t, for the most part.

And those who do know, would agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.

It’s a lot more complex than Bob and Charlie fighting each other with shillelaghs, arguing over scripture as they’re supping pints of stout.

(*Greenslade, R. (2019). The Belfast blindspot: How Britain still doesn’t get Northern Ireland. New Statesman, October 23, 2019.)

Paul Breen is @CharltonMen on Twitter/X.