Old newspaper clip reveals a movie star’s love of County Down

That particular gap was more than adequately filled by story-teller Doreen McBride’s intriguing, illustrated history of the gruesomely-sculpted cavader tombstones in St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Drogheda.

But another omission has just been highlighted by a north coast reader’s e-mail which began enthrallingly, “Jurassic Park at Ballykinlar!”

Accompanying the e-mail was a faded newspaper article and photograph.

Crediting his wife with finding the cutting in a 28-year-old newspaper “in which our engagement was announced” the e-mailer added a romantic little anniversary heart to his note and continued “so Sam Diarmuid Neill spent time as a boy at Ballykinlar - who knew?”

Roamer certainly didn’t!

The newspaper cutting from July 1993 was headlined “Jurassic actor left Ireland after IRA raid.”

It was about Omagh-born actor Sam Neill, who played Dr Alan Grant in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park movie.

Marking the opening of the film in Ireland in 1993, Mr Neill explained in the article the circumstances around his family moving to New Zealand where his mother Priscilla originally came from.

The cutting recounted that Neill “was aged eight when the IRA seized more than 700 weapons after breaking into a British military base in Armagh, where his father Dermot was Commanding Officer.”

The guns were stolen from Gough Barracks in June 1954 “just before the start of the IRA Border campaign” the article continued.

The actor explained that the Neill family were holidaying in “an old lighthouse keepers’ place on the beach at Tyrella” whenever his dad’s Army Barracks was broken into and the arms were stolen.

“I still get a lump in my throat when I hear Van Morrison sing about County Down,” Mr Neill admitted in the article, adding “that song (Coney Island) brings it to life for me. I love that place.”

The actor reminisced about Tyrella where he “woke every morning to the magnificent view of the Mournes. We caught lobsters and crab on the rocks. They were some of the best years of my life.”

The film star said he’d also spent happy boyhood days at Ballykinlar, close the Mourne Mountains, and had been back to Northern Ireland (and he’s returned more recently) but his parents never came back.

He added “My parents felt such nostalgia for the North. They even gave me Diarmuid (Dermot) as my second name. I think it would have been too painful for them to go back.”

He said that the Northern Ireland of 1990s depressed him. “Around Ballykinlar nothing has changed,” he said, “but in Belfast I saw the barbed wire and so on, and felt so sad.”

The actor remembered the guns being stolen from Gough Barracks - “at the time I didn’t know the importance of the IRA in terms of my father’s career. But soon after, we left Northern Ireland.”

Aside from his huge tally of box office successes including Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October, The Piano, Sirens, Event Horizon and most famously Jurassic Park, Neill has appeared in numerous television series, including Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983), The Simpsons (1994), Merlin (1998), The Tudors (2007), Crusoe (2008-2010), Happy Town (2010), Alcatraz (2012), Peaky Blinders (2013-2014), Rick and Morty (2019) and has presented and narrated a number of documentaries.

But as well as being actor, writer, producer, and director the Omagh-born movie-star is also a vineyard proprietor.

He started his ‘Two Paddocks’ wine producing business in 1993 with five acres of pinot noir vines in a little vineyard at Gibbston, Central Otago in the deep south of New Zealand.

The original vineyard was augmented by three other small vineyards, sited in the Alexandra and Bannockburn districts of Central Otago.

Intriguingly, he’s quoted as saying “I’d like the vineyard to support me but I’m afraid it is the other way round. It is not a very economic business. It is a ridiculously time - and money-consuming business. I would not do it if it was not so satisfying and fun, and it gets me p****d once in a while.”

His vineyards are also homes to dozens of cows, sheep, hens and pigs, which he has reportedly named after some of his film-industry colleagues!

He has a bull called Graham Norton, and previously had one called James Nesbitt.

He has pigs called Angelica Huston and Imogen Poots and a rooster named Michael Fassbender.

He once described Northern Ireland as his idea of the Garden of Eden.

Recalling his childhood in an interview eight years ago he said that he “would range freely around the beautiful countryside, and I vividly remember, too, going with my brother to Tyrella beach - one of the greatest in the British Isles - and fishing for hours on the rocks; no one was there; it was ours.”

He recently described County Down as “an idyllic place for a childhood” and undoubtedly it still is his very special place.

He admitted in a 2016 interview “I’ve got three passports; New Zealand, British and Irish, and I’m happy to have all three in my wallet. But my DNA is decidedly Irish. I was born there. It’s part of me and I’m part of it.”

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