Oileán an Ghuail · Co. Tyrone
Ireland's first commercial canal is a drainage ditch now, and the town that built it sent the first civil rights marchers into the road in 1968.
Coalisland is a town of about 6,300 people in east Tyrone, four miles from Lough Neagh, that was built around a canal that was never quite right from the start. The Tyrone Navigation - also called the Coalisland Canal - took fifty-four years to complete. It was designed to carry coal from the Drumglass collieries south of town down to the River Blackwater, and from there along the Lough Neagh system toward Dublin. The coal never travelled as planned. After the Act of Union in 1800, Dublin imported cheap English coal and the whole economic justification for the canal collapsed. What the canal actually ended up moving was bricks, tiles, earthenware, sulphuric acid, and agricultural goods - a decent trade, but not the one anyone had in mind when they spent £25,000 of public money building the thing.
The canal closed in 1954. The basin was drained in 1961. If you park in the car park beside the old Coalisland Cornmill today, you are standing on what was once the head of navigation. The channel south toward the Blackwater is mostly still intact - the towpath walk along it runs about 4.5 miles, flat, through decent Tyrone farmland. The lock structures are derelict. A group affiliated with the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland has been working since the 1990s to keep the restoration question alive.
The other thing Coalisland is known for is 24 August 1968. On that evening, the Campaign for Social Justice and the newly-formed Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association organised a march from the town to Dungannon - three miles on the main road, with around 2,500 people, taking their cues explicitly from the US civil rights movement. The march was about housing discrimination: nationalist families in Dungannon were overcrowded and disadvantaged while vacant council houses were allocated to unionist families. The RUC stopped the marchers at Dungannon Market Square, where Ian Paisley had organised a counter-demonstration as a pretext for the ban. The marchers sat down and sang 'We Shall Overcome'. It was Northern Ireland's first civil rights march and, as historians have noted, its last bloodless one. The Derry march on 5 October 1968 was beaten off the street by police with batons.
The town has a strong GAA tradition. Coalisland Na Fianna was founded in 1903, won the first Tyrone senior championship the following year, and has ten senior county titles on the board - the last in 2018. Michelle O'Neill, First Minister of Northern Ireland, is from the town. Dennis Taylor, who potted the black on the last ball of the 1985 World Snooker Championship final, is also from here. The Craic Theatre and Arts Centre runs from a converted weaving factory on the Dungannon Road and has been staging youth and touring shows since 1996.