Writing by Yvonne Watterson

~ considering the lilies & lessons from the field ©

Writing by Yvonne Watterson

Tag Archives: The Wayside Halt

Haunted

23 Wednesday Oct 2024

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora, Northern Ireland, Rituals, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, United Workers Council Strike 1974

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Halloween, Northern Ireland Troubles, Storytelling for Peace, The Wayside Halt, United Workers Council Strike 1974, Van Morrison

This weekend, inspired by an Instagram post about a perfect Fall appetizer, I bought a pumpkin. Looking at it taking up too much space on the kitchen counter, it occurs to me that it’s too big for the Hot Honey Pumpkin Baked Brie I planned. It will be better as a jack-o’-lantern by the front door. This leads me to Halloweens past and a story you should know.


Where I’m from, there’s some debate about Halloween, with some saying it’s derived from the ancient pagan festival of Samhain and others that it started out as Hallows’ Eve, the day before All Saints’ Day. Whatever it is, it remains my favorite time of year when, on the cusp of winter,  the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, the souls of our long-dead ancestors emerging through it, seeking warmth and communion with us.

Halloween in 1970s Northern Ireland was different from the holiday I eventually embraced in the United States. There were no expensive costumes and no elaborately carved pumpkins—there were no pumpkins. Wrapped up in our duffel coats, “disguised” in hard plastic ‘false faces’ attached to our real faces with a thin elastic band and through which it was almost impossible to breathe we roamed the estate, ringing doorbells and singing at the top of our lungs:

We roamed the housing estate, ringing doorbells and singing at the top of our lungs:

Halloween is coming and the goose is getting fat,
Would you please put a penny in the old mans hat,
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny then god bless you

Somebody always thought to bring a torch to light up our faces. Sweating under our false faces, I suppose we thought we looked menacing. Meanwhile, our parents stayed at home and watched television. If we were lucky, somebody gave us sparklers which was very exciting because fireworks had been banned—outlawed due to fears that they might sound like bomb blasts or gunfire. I suppose there were also concerns that they might be used to make bombs or weapons.

With this behind me by the time I became a mother in the United States, I embraced Halloween in all its commercialized glory, unaware of its origins in my native land. I didn’t know until recently the legend of Stingy Jack who had been sentenced by the devil to roam the earth for eternity, his path lit by a burning coal inside the carved-out turnip he carried.  To scare away Jack and any other wandering evil spirits, Irish people eventually made their own versions of his lantern, carving ghoulish faces into turnips placed in windows.  When Irish immigrants arrived in America with their jack-o′-lantern tradition, they discovered that pumpkins made the perfect Halloween lantern. Indeed they do.

Every year, we’d go to the nearest pumpkin patch for three perfect pumpkins which would be carved and decorated, and when the sun went down on Halloween, my husband lit candles inside them to welcome the scores of children who walked to our door over the years. It always reminded me of that whimsical scene in E.T., tiny versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Tinkerbell, Spiderman, Jack Sparrow, Pikachu, even the sitting President of the United States.


There was never a trick, always a treat from a big popcorn bowl filled with Kit-Kat bars, M&Ms, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and full-size Snickers bars. Word on the street was that all the good candy was at our house. Between us, we took turns handing out the candy, but I preferred to be with the merry band of trick-or-treaters, strolling along Montebello Avenue, stopping only a few paces behind to wait while my miniature make-believe princess knocked on the doors of strangers. This annual trek through the neighborhood always ended with her sprinting to our front door, where she rang the doorbell and called out “Trick or treat!” Feigning surprise, her daddy would fling the door open and fill her plastic pumpkin basket to the brim.

Our last family Halloween was quiet. It was a school night, the Wednesday before the 2012 General Election. Not yet a United States citizen, I couldn’t vote, but I nonetheless studied the pamphlet of Arizona Propositions on our kitchen table, and my husband let me fill in the bubbles on his ballot. I remember promising him I would become a citizen in time for the next presidential election.

When I voted early last week, I imagined him smiling down at me. Imagine. Me, early.

That particular Halloween didn’t feel right, with November just hours away and the night air still hovering around 80 degrees. Nonetheless, when the sun went down, our ritual began. We lit the candles in the pumpkins, and Sophie decided it was her turn to dole out the Halloween candy. Sporting ears of a fictional Japanese cat and a black tail, both hand-sewn by her best friend, she took great delight in the younger children who couldn’t wait to be scared by the pale motion-sensitive ghost howling above our door.


I remember I was preoccupied, sitting at my computer paying bills for the breast cancer treatment that had dominated our lives that year, scrolling through work emails I hadn’t found time to read at work, and following news of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. I was also half-listening to Van Morrison playing in the background, and as he repeated the ritual of nights spent “spinning and turning in the alley like a whirling dervish,” I remember feeling a strong pull to days gone by. Surreal and visceral, maybe the kind of moment Greill Marcus described in his Listening to Van Morrison.

Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself. It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves.

In an instant, Van Morrison takes me back to County Antrim and into the lives of two sisters I have yet to meet in real life. The first, Mary, had once stumbled upon something I had written online and left a comment that forever connected us, as is the way of the virtual world. You know how it goes—we search for one thing and find another that renders the first forgotten. Within this much smaller world, I learned that her cousin, Pauline, had been my hairdresser in the 1980s.

Every time I visited her for bigger hair or more highlights, there was always a moment—a ritual— when I considered silently, the family pub across the road. The Wayside Halt stood on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena. Nondescript, it was the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look, unremarkable except to those of us who knew about the horror that had visited on May 24, 1974. When I sank into Pauline’s hairdresser’s chair, I thought about it.

It wasn’t until one night years after I had left Northern Ireland, that I learned more about what had happened at The Wayside Halt. I don’t remember how the subject came up—my father was maybe trying to explain The Troubles to my American husband, and the ways in which we were all impacted by those years. He recalled for us that evening, when one of his friends had suggested they call into The Wayside Halt for a quick pint since it was on the road home. Knowing the unlikelihood of a “quick pint” and because he was in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark, my father declined.

Even in the days before cell phones, news in our place always traveled fast. Before daddy reached Randalstown not an hour later, the harrowing word had arrived that a mob of Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt and shot at point-blank range, Mary’s uncles—Shaun Byrne and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked too, their places of business vandalized because they had remained open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974 a seminal two weeks in Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles.’ Just a child at the time, I remember the rolling electricity blackouts—the “power cuts” that meant candle light and dinners cooked on a camping stove to cook. In my naivete, I didn’t know I had any reason to be afraid.


Shaun and his brother Brendan were executed while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In the picture Mary sent me, the only child not home that evening was the little girl at her father’s right shoulder.

Eight fatherless children. Two widows. A community devastated.

The Byrne Brothers.

The Quinn brothers –  Richard, Mark, and Jason –  three little boys burned to death on July 12, 1998. Just eleven, nine, and seven years old, they had been asleep when a petrol bomb was thrown through their bedroom window. In our small world, their grandmother was the subject of my brother’s first interview as he started a career in journalism covering the kinds of atrocities that should only have happened once.

Bloody Sunday, La Mon Restaurant, Crossmaglen, The Miami Showband Massacre, Kingsmills, Internment, the bombing of Omagh and Enniskillen, Greysteel, Frizzell’s fish shop.

The list goes on, hearts grows numb …

Physically untouched by this string of horrors, but changed nonetheless, the images are indelible in the storehouse of my memory. Father Daly waving a blood-stained white handkerchief; the blood on Market Street in the heart of Omagh’s little market town; the platform boot on the side of the road near Banbridge; mourners at the Ballymurphy funeral on a little black and white television.

So many names.

Too many ghosts among us.

This is Anne Byrne’s Halloween story first posted on November 1, 2005. Like her sister Mary, she had left a comment for me. The world contracts once more.


Uncle Brendan and the Hallowe’en Parties

I loved Hallowe’en when I was wee, except it was called Holloween in those days. Next to Christmas, it was the best holiday of the year.  It was also mid-term break. Holloween was always celebrated in our house.  When we were very small my mother would make a lantern from a turnip she’d scobe out with a knife which, if you’ve ever tried to do it, is bloody hard work. The next oldest sister to me was very keen on traditions even ones she’d made up herself.  When she was around eight she decided that every year she and I would make witches’ hats out of newspapers rolled into cones and blackened with shoe polish.  So we did this for at least 3 or 4 years.  We’d run around the yard with the pointy, floppy hats falling down over our eyes, our faces and hair stained with polish, singing:

I’m Winnie the Witch, Witches can fly and so can I, I’m Winnie the Witch’

I have no idea where this came from.

In the evening we would tie apples from a string attached to the ceiling and try to bite lumps out of them or duck for apples in a basin of water set on the kitchen floor.  This involved much splashing on the quarry tiles and younger siblings spluttering and snottering into the water.   I was pretty crap at it but my brother would have drowned himself rather than admit defeat. He would suddenly rear out of the water, his whole upper body soaked, grinning so widely that he was in danger of dropping his prize.  Later we’d have apple tart with hidden money in it wrapped up in silver paper.

When we all got to be a bit older my aunt and uncle, who had no children of their own,  held a party each Hallowe’en.  They only invited our family and one set of cousins which meant they had 15 children in attendance. There was always a bonfire and sparklers but no fireworks as they were banned in Northern Ireland.In the middle of the party there would be a loud clatter on the door and my uncle would go and investigate.  Without fail he would return with a scary stranger with a stick, wearing a thick coat and a scarf wrapped round his face.  Usually the stranger did a lot of muttering and, more often than not, he’d use his stick to take a swing at you if you came too close.  As the evening progressed and we worked ourselves up into a frenzy the stranger would suddenly reveal themselves to be the man who lived next door or even occasionally our Aunt Mary.  Presumably she got drafted in by my uncle in the years when he couldn’t persuade any of the neighbors to come and scare us half to death. I think the parties started coming to an end when I was in my early teens but by then I’d grown out of them.

I always think of my uncle at this time of year.  He was murdered, along with his brother, in the mid 70s but in Spring not October.  The scary, masked strangers who came to the door that night didn’t reveal themselves to be friends or family.

All this happened a long time ago and besides, the past is a different country – but it has been haunting me lately.

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By the Wayside on St. Patrick’s Day

14 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by Editor in Being young, Coming of age, craic, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Irish American relations, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, St. Patrick's Day, The Troubles, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, United Workers Council Strike 1974

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1970s Northern Ireland, Irish DIASPORA, St. Patrick's Day, The Byrne Brothers, The Troubles, The Wayside Halt, Ulster Workers Strike

“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night


I am ambivalent about St. Patrick’s Day, still not sure what it is about March 17th that renders so many people Irish or some version of it that I do not recall from living the first twenty-seven years of my life in Northern Ireland. Everywhere I turn on Friday, there will be Americans proclaiming their Irishness, some in T-shirts emblazoned with a command to kiss them, others bearing warnings that they are falling-down drunk. Because they are Irish. Even elected officials whose nationality we never knew or cared about will become bona fide Irish. I wonder just how many frazzled interns there must be in these United States, tasked by politicians keen on maintaining a hold on “the Irish vote,” with finding some verifiable, however microscopic, proof of their Irish heritage.

Identity matters. Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who am I? Am I Irish? Northern Irish? British? Ulster Irish? Well, it depends, and I know I’m entering dangerous territory here, especially this year as we grapple with Brexit and the outcome of the recent Assembly election in Northern Ireland. My brother, more eloquent than I, and still living and working in Ireland, broke it down for me one day, commenting on the “fractured and dissensual nature of our cultural background, where declarations of nationhood are open to contention (Northern Ireland versus the North of Ireland; Derry versus Londonderry) and can be dangerous, and potentially fatal.” Maybe this is why I traded in my homeland for America, falling in love with the very idea of it, an idea that I watched unravel at break-neck speed in the 2016 race for President of the United States.

I consider myself Irish – or as my favorite professor used to say of me, I “aspire to a united Ireland” – but my “documentation” suggests something of an identity crisis. I was born in Northern Ireland and own a British passport (just to be on the safe side) and I need to renew my Irish passport before we are booted out of the EU. My American permanent residency card states Ireland as my country of birth, but my birth certificate states my birthplace as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I am one of her Royal Majesty’s subjects –  except when I’m not – like the time a waiter at Heathrow Airport refused to accept my money because, although Sterling, it was printed on a Bank of Ulster note. My money had identified me as something other than acceptable.

A more subtle subtext persists in America. Even in Arizona, a flashpoint for immigration issues, it seems everyone is at least fractionally Irish on March 17th. With green beer flowing and all those ringlets bouncing heavily on the heads of Irish dancers, and people pinching me if I’m not wearing green, I sometimes wonder if maybe I was always absent on St. Patrick’s Day. How could I have missed all these shenanigans even though I grew up down the road from Mount Slemish, where the Patron Saint tended his sheep?

Contemplating all of this, and for the record, I feel compelled to tell you that along with a bunch of girls from school, I attended Irish Dancing every week at the Protestant Hall on Railway Street in Antrim. Also for the record, none of us had either the ringlets or the straight backs and long legs of Flatley’s Riverdancers. Still, I loved it, and while I have long since forgotten the name of our lovely teacher, I remember that she was kind and made me feel like I was a dancer. Today, I couldn’t do a slip-jig to save my life, but I can prove that I once could – I could show you inside the red box that held my first Timex watch, where wrapped in tissue paper are all my medals.

And I suppose because I appreciated the craft that went into it, and I wanted to hold on to it when I came to America, I even brought with me – in my rucksack– the dancing costume that last fit me when I was 12. It hangs in the back of a closet, reminiscent of Miss Havisham’s wedding dress. I don’t think I could part with it.

Then there’s the corned beef and cabbage.  I have never had corned beef and cabbage. Not even once. We always had the best of sirloin from Stewart’s Butchers – a place with saffron colored sawdust on the floor in which I traced figures of eight with the toes of my brogues. An imaginative child, I pretended I was cutting through ice on the blades of Harriet’s skates as she spun around a frozen pond in Tom’s Midnight Garden.  I remember being a bit afraid of the young butchers. Even though they weren’t that much older than me, they were mildly menacing in their blue and white striped aprons all smeared with blood and bits of raw beef, sharpening their knives while I stood on the other side of the counter ordering a pound of minced beef for mammy.

As for cabbage, I still associate it with the overcooked vegetables, lumpy custard, and tapioca served for lunch at Antrim Primary School. Mind you, as my mother will no doubt remind me, when fried up with a bit of good bacon from Golden’s – the wee shop – cabbage is hard to beat, although not as good as turnip. But it had nothing to do with St. Patrick. Corned beef and cabbage would have been no more than a n unfortunate coincidence on St. Patrick’s Day four decades ago.

Then there are the shamrocks and the snakes. I don’t remember Pat the barman in The Crown Bar in Belfast ever taking the time to trace a shamrock on the head of a pint of Guinness for my friend Ruth or me, and as much time as we spent in there – and as much as we flirted with him – it was the least he could have done. Nor do I remember shamrocks or Celtic knots tattooed on young shoulders; rather, they were carved into headstones in old graveyards or embellished around stained glass windows at church. I never paid much attention to that bit of the story when St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland, although it has come back to me when I have sidestepped the odd snake slithering across my path on a hike through the Phoenix mountains. Real talk – they have been much less poisonous than the human variety.

Now wasn’t St. Patrick very clever to have found in nature a perfect symbol for Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to help him spread The Word? This was how I learned about the Holy Trinity in Sunday School, and I always think about it when I recall those delicate shamrocks wilting in the buttonholes of suits worn by Catholic neighbors who went to mass on St. Patrick’s Day. Back then, it seemed that most Protestants either “took no notice” of the holiday or characterized it as something reserved for those “on the other side.” There’s a bit of irony there, given the young saint’s passion for spreading Christianity.

All that being said, by the time I was living and studying in Belfast, St. Patrick’s Day had evolved into a good excuse for an extended pub crawl with a motley crew of art students, engineers, and teachers.  The last St. Patrick’s Day I spent back home was in 1987. It was a cold Tuesday night, and we were on the hunt for craic and pints, so we piled in a taxi and headed for The Wayside Halt, a nondescript country pub on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena. It’s the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look. Walking into it, I sobered, the events of May 24, 1974, rushing at me like scenes from a black and white documentary. My father had told me about how on that May evening, one of his friends had suggested stopping at the pub for a quick pint on the way home. Back home, the “quick pint” is something of a paradox, and because da was in a rush to complete his bread deliveries before dark that Friday night, he declined. As he tells it, before he reached Randalstown, the harrowing word had arrived that within the previous hour, Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt, and shot at point-blank range, the Catholic publican, Shaun Byrne, and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked as well, their places of business vandalized because they had decided to remain open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974.

Shaun and Brendan Byrne were murdered, while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. And in the picture sent to me by one of the Byrne family, the only child not home that evening is the little girl standing at her father’s right shoulder.


Somehow – I know not how – Mrs. Byrne kept going, and on that St. Patrick’s Day in 1987, she outdid herself, with a giant pot of Irish stew, the likes of which I defy you to find in America. Bland to the American taste-buds, I’m sure, but when combined with an aromatic turf fire, a half-un of Jamesons or a hot Powers whiskey, and someone like Big Mickey playing “The Lonesome Boatman” on a tin whistle in the back bar, it was big and bold in flavor. It was unforgettable. On such a night, we basked in our Irish identity.

We knew who we were.

And every St. Patrick’s Day since, I am drawn back to The Wayside Halt. For the craic. For a pint with good friends. For Mrs. Byrne. And to bear witness.

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Remembering Ian Paisley & Dreams Deferred

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by Editor in Aging, bombing, Children of The Troubles, Death and dying, Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley, IRA, Irish Diaspora, Martin McGuinness, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Peace, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, UVF

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!970s Northern Ireland, forgiveness, Martin McGuinness, Paisley, Sinn Fein, The Good Friday Agreement, The Troubles, The Wayside Halt, Ulster Workers Strike

I suppose if you live long enough, almost nine decades, all is eventually forgiven.  At least that’s what the obituaries for Rev. Ian Paisley suggest. Like many of us, I was raised to observe the “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” credo, to speak no ill of the dead, but in the days since Ian Paisley’s passing, I have grown increasingly vexed over the glowing online obituaries, the over-the-top eulogizing of a man, who from the year of my birth until the year I left Northern Ireland, railed against the Catholic church, spewing hate and bigotry – brilliantly – and inciting countless followers to violence.

 

 

I did not know Ian Paisley as a father and a husband. I know nothing of the way he conducted his private life. I empathize with his grieving family and friends – he was an old man and in poor health when he died. As well, I feel compelled to comment on his public life which splashed noisily onto mine and the lives of so many ordinary people living in Northern Ireland, people who wanted peace some forty years before the fragile state of it in place today, people who were denied it in large part because of Paisley’s immovability, his fire and brimstone ferocity, his rabble-rousing. Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, writes that for decades:

Ian Paisley was seen as part of an intractable and unending problem in the North of Ireland. But in the end, he made a powerful and determined contribution to resolving that problem  and pointing to a new way forward based on dialogue, respect, partnership and reconciliation.

Unlike McGuinness,  I am not a politician. I am a teacher who began her career in a Belfast classroom, where students revered Paisley and openly despised Catholics. Where did that hatred come from? Much of it was fueled by the rhetoric of Ian Paisley. In that classroom, I had a daily opportunity to observe what happens to a country when the hearts of its young harden, and I cannot forgive Ian Paisley for his part in that. I read recently that the best age to learn a new language is 11-13, early adolescence. Thus, it saddens me to consider the opportunities squandered by Paisley and his ilk. When he was at the height of his power, he had so many chances to to teach the language of peace and understanding, but he chose not to, and he stood by that choice for too many years of turmoil and bloodshed.

I know of course that my opinion of Ian Paisley probably doesn’t matter much. I know that in spite of being told to do the decent thing and to say nothing against a man who cannot defend himself in death, I feel a profound sense of obligation to speak publicly about the impact of his thundering, virulent attacks on Catholicism, liberalism, the Civil Rights movement, mixed marriage, and homosexuality, because he played a starring role in the destruction of dreams of peace and unity for so many of us.  Along with the black and white images of The Troubles that flicker still in my memory –  the banging of the bin-lids, the soldiers on street corners, the bombed out shops and the panic-stricken faces of families forced out of their homes, I can hear Ian Paisley roaring from our television set, his violent rhetoric scaring the little girl I once was.

There is no doubt, as the obituaries reveal, that Paisley, the “Big Man from Ballymena” (who called himself a child of God) was a masterful politician. More than most, he knew how to work a room, how to whip a crowd into a frenzy, how to frighten his followers into believing that their cultural heritage, their very way of life was at risk, and, he knew how to step back, absolved of any responsibility for what they might do. He was instrumental in bringing Northern Ireland to a standstill – “a constitutional stoppage” – through the Ulster Workers’ Strike (UWS) of 1974.

Forty years on, and on the other side of the world, I cannot write about the UWS without writing about what happened on May 24, 1974 at The Wayside Halt, a nondescript country pub on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena, the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look.

The Wayside Halt will forever linger in a corner of my consciousness, refining my sense of who I am.  My father told me not too long ago that on that May evening in 1974, one of his friends had suggested stopping at the pub for a quick pint on the way home. Back home, the “quick pint” is something of a paradox, and because dad was in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark that Friday night, he declined.  Before he reached Randalstown, the harrowing word had arrived that within the previous hour, Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt, and shot at point-blank range, the Catholic publican,Shaun Byrne, and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked as well, their places of business vandalized because they had decided to remain open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974.

Shaun and Brendan Byrne were murdered, while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In the picture sent to me by one of the Byrne family, the only child not home that evening is the little girl at her father’s right shoulder.

Ian Paisley – man of God – did not attend their funerals. Intransigent and unyielding, it would take another quarter of a century of bloodshed – a lifetime – before he would accept the Good Friday agreement and share power with his former Nationalist enemies as First Minister in the new devolved government.

Too late for the Byrne brothers and their families.

Too late for me.

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Immigration matters

From there to here . . .

Yvonne hails from Antrim, Northern Ireland, and has lived in the desert southwest of the United States for almost thirty years. Married, with a daughter who is navigating her path through the "teen tunnel," and a haughty cat, Atticus, she has spent the better part of the last three decades in the classroom as a student, teacher, and administrator. Her mid-life crisis came as a sneaky Stage II invasive breast cancer diagnosis which subsequently sent her to the blogosphere where she found a virtual home away from home . . .
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