County Fermanagh
Fear Manach
- IrishFear Manach
- ProvinceUlster
- County townEnniskillen, by tradition
- Local governmentNo county council since 1973. The county lies wholly in Fermanagh and Omagh district
- Area1,851 km²
- Population63,585 (2021)
- Highest pointCuilcagh, 666 m, shared with Cavan
The Donegal Corridor
The flying boats at Castle Archdale were a few miles from the Atlantic. The short way out lay over neutral Donegal. In 1941 the Irish government let them fly it, along the River Erne to the sea. It was known as the Donegal Corridor.
On the twenty sixth of May 1941 a Catalina on patrol found the Bismarck, after the fleet had lost track of her. The aircraft was holed by fire from the ship and later lost touch, but the fleet had her position.
She was sunk the next morning.
Cormac Óg
Devenish
Saint Molaise founded a monastery on the island in the sixth century. Vikings raided it in 837. It was burned in 1157.
What stands now is later. The round tower and the small church called St Molaise's House are twelfth century. The Augustinian priory on the hill is fifteenth century, and so is the carved cross.
The only way there is by boat.
Cormac Óg
Gordon Wilson
A draper, born in Manorhamilton in 1927, who kept a shop in Enniskillen and was a Methodist.
On Remembrance Sunday, the eighth of November 1987, an IRA bomb brought a wall down on the crowd at the cenotaph. Wilson and his daughter Marie, a trainee nurse of twenty, were buried in the rubble. He held her hand. She died a few hours later. Eleven people were killed.
That night on BBC radio he said he prayed for the bombers and that talk of revenge was futile. He did not use the word forgiveness, though that is what the world heard.
He sat in the Seanad from 1993 and met the IRA to ask it to stop. He died in 1995.
Cormac Óg