Rosminian Fathers, French statues, 1908
The Calvary
On 17 March 1908 the Rosminian Fathers blessed a hillside Calvary on the road out of Omeath toward Carlingford. The statues — Christ crucified, Our Lady of Sorrows, St John, and a few months later St Mary Magdalene — had been carried from France after the anti-clerical government of 1903 expelled the religious orders. The fourteen Stations of the Cross were blessed in April 1909. The Rosminians had founded St Michael's College in the village in 1901; they buried Father Aloysius Gentili, the Italian missionary who built the Irish mission, on the hill in 1938. The site has been a pilgrimage ever since. The new oratory and the Lourdes Grotto were added later. It is small, weathered, surprisingly moving on a wet Wednesday.
The last eastern Gaeltacht
Omeath Irish
Native Irish was spoken in Omeath into the mid-twentieth century — the last Gaeltacht in the eastern half of the island. The dialect was its own thing, distinct from Donegal or Connacht, and it was holding on in pockets when the German linguist Wilhelm Doegen turned up in 1928 with recording equipment for the Royal Irish Academy. Anne O'Hanlon was reckoned to be the last native speaker; she died in 1960. The Christian Brothers ran summer schools in the village to teach the language to children from across Ireland. The cadence is gone; the place-names are still here.
Dundalk, Newry & Greenore Railway
The Greenway and the line
The narrow-gauge railway from Dundalk to Greenore opened in 1873 and a branch up the lough to Newry was added in 1876, with a station in Omeath. For seventy-five years it brought Belfast day-trippers down to a Free State village where the licensing laws were laxer and the air was good. The line closed in 1951. Twenty years ago Louth and Newry, Mourne & Down District Council agreed to put a Greenway on the trackbed; the Carlingford-to-Omeath section opened in 2014 and now runs into the village. The bicycles you see on the main street came down the old line.
Five minutes across, eight centuries waiting
The ferry and the bridge
A foot ferry between Omeath and Warrenpoint has run on and off for two centuries. The current seasonal service crosses the half-kilometre at high water in five minutes — pedestrians, cyclists, the odd small motorbike. After decades of being talked about, the Narrow Water Bridge between Warrenpoint and Omeath finally went into the ground in 2024 and is due to open this side of the decade. When it does, Omeath will be a five-minute drive from a Northern town for the first time since 1951. People in the bar are divided on whether that is good.