Sligo in the 1980's
The Bective Hotel, as well as Sligo, were places full of character and full of life in the 1980s. The lifestyle and many of the characters are gone now, but I wanted to record them for posterity as well as bring them back to life.My family arrived in Sligo when I was a teenager, and I left when I was in my mid-twenties. That intervening time which I spent in Sligo town and county marked the best years of my life.I couldn’t imagine a better place to have spent my formative years. However, when I arrived I thought it archaic and lost in time. I was more used to the urban and cosmopolitan environments of London and Belfast. Yet I would probably have never visited Belfast if it wasn't for a friend I met in Sligo.Just like a salmon spawned in its rivers, whenever I left Sligo, I always loved the feeling of returning home. It represented freedom for me. Freedom of the countryside which often seemed open ended and ownerless, and freedom of the constraints of polite society.
Sligo was raw underneath its veneer of polite society. The people from the west of Ireland only paid lip service to rules or the law. Even the local Guards who upheld the law would turn a blind eye.
My first breathalyser was a guard smelling my breath and telling me to drive straight home. One of Sligo’s motorcycle cops was the first person to suggest that I avoid traffic around the one-way system by riding my motorcycle down the footpath between the town's two bridges.
In 1978, most of the town’s shops had family names above their doors. They packaged everything you bought in brown paper and tied it up with string. Today when I walk about in large retail and shopping centres with high ceilings and every corporate logo on show, I yearn for the simplicity of life back then.
Sure employment was low-tech back then, but so was our leisure pursuits, but they were both real and fun.
Sligo is still a wonderful town on the edge of the world, but it has changed incredibly over the years. My desire to write this book was to capture the essence of what it was like living there
