Frank McGuinness: 'One thing I’ll say about my home town, we could keep our secrets'

In my novel Arimathea, an Italian painter arrives in 50s Donegal to paint the Stations of the Cross – to the locals, he could have come from Mercury

In the Donegal of my distant childhood it’s fair to say we were not overrun with strangers. Yes, through July and August, most of Scotland decamped here in throngs – the Glasgow fair, the Greenock fair, the Paisley fair; packing the shores, the dancehalls and pubs; spending their hard-earned wages saved for the big fortnight across the water; generous, defying any nonsense about meanness.

In those less damaged days, they were content to be regarded as our own, for our cultures connected as deeply as our dialects. So, when it came to outsiders, I remember clearly a niece of our neighbour, Nurse Kelly – the local midwife who delivered the lot of us – visiting from Carrick-on-Shannon. We all regarded her, much to the poor girl’s consternation, as quite the exotic creature, surely a first for anyone from Leitrim.

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