Brexit vote stirs fears of return to Troubles
ISLAND OF IRELAND ONE OF THE BIGGEST WILD CARDS
Back during the Troubles, the border here was a treacherous place, a briar patch of watchtowers and customs posts, and rough smuggling clans and lethal Irish Republican Army cells.
A generation ago? So fearful were British troops of IRA snipers that they deployed their soldiers in helicopters instead of risking the roads in County Armagh.
Today this is a fine place to be a cow.
Now there is peace — and plenty of golf being played — along the 500 kilometres of the sinuous border that separates Northern Ireland from Ireland.
Yet change may be coming to the frontier, following the vote in June by Britain to leave the European Union.
What will happen to the Irish isle, north and south, is one of the biggest wild cards of the Brexit vote.
Northern Ireland is a part of Britain, and so they must now bid goodbye to the European bloc.
Their neighbours to the south in Ireland will remain part of the European Union.
What will happen to trade and travel is unknown — and there are even bigger questions being asked about unification of the island.
Will a Romanian travelling from Dublin soon have to show a passport on the way to Belfast? Will a bottle of milk cost the same on both sides — and who will enforce the regulations for its proper pasteurization?
“Nobody knows what’s going to happen to our border, and people who know the least are the politicians,” said Eugene McSkeane, 39, a hog farmer in Crossmaglen in Northern Ireland.
“We pay our electric bill in the south and our water bills in the north,” he said. “It’s second nature.”
Kids go to schools on either side. Farmers till land that straddles the line. A local veterinarian said it’s a morning’s work to treat a cow in the north and a sheep in the south.
“Technically, I imagine you’re supposed to check in with someone when you transport a (person) across the border, but I don’t see why you would bother with that now,” said Bernard O’Hanlon, 56, a funeral director and owner of a pub in Mullaghbawn in Northern Ireland.
“We’ve forgotten all about borders,” he said. “Now are they going to mean something again? That’s daft.”
At the crossroads near O’Hanlon’s is a monument to fallen fighters who died during the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule that led to independence for Ireland. Beneath the flowers and portraits are the words, “If you really want an Irish Republic vote Sinn Fein.”
“Drive down the hill over the river, you won’t see a sign telling you you just crossed a border,” said Brendan McAleavy, 55, a publican in Cullaville, whose bar has two different drawers at the cash register, one for British pounds, the other for euros.
More than 180 formal roads cross the border between — many more if you count tractor trails and foot paths.
Alasdair McDonnell, a member of Parliament from Belfast, said he’s been deluged with queries from constituents worried about what will happen to the border.
“We’ve opened up a can of worms,” he warned during a debate in Parliament.
“There’s been massive progress and benefits of the last 20 years,” he said. “Free movement has transformed the island of Ireland.”
“There are people with a living memory of the hard border, and it’s not a good memory at all,” said McDonnell, a member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party.
It was only 15 years ago that the last bomb exploded in the long conflict between British security forces and Ulster loyalist paramilitaries and the Irish Republican Army. More than 3,500 people were killed during the Troubles, half of them civilians.
The peace brought by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement is now well-worn, widely accepted and an economic success for both north and south.
But change is worrisome for some.
“Brexit got everyone talking, that’s for sure. It reminds everyone who is who, where is where, north and south, the Troubles, all of that,” said Anne Devlin, a shop clerk who was filling her car with gas in Castleblayney in Ireland but who lives in Northern Ireland.
“The past is best in the past,” Devlin said.
“It doesn’t take much to stir tensions on the border,” said Eunan O’Halpin, a professor of contemporary Irish history at Trinity College in Dublin. “Is there still bitterness? Of course there is.”
After the Brexit ballot, Irish politicians quickly began to jostle for advantage as they assessed what future negotiations over the coming split would mean.
Sinn Fein’s leader, Gerry Adams, said that the vote by Northern Ireland against Brexit should boost support for a future referendum on Irish unity.
But talk of such a “border poll” to consider the reunification of north and south raises hackles among British loyalists in the north.
Arlene Foster, first minister of Northern Ireland, vowed little would change along the border and said talk of a referendum on the unification of Ireland was folly.
“This is the silly season, and often we have people coming forward with policy ideas that have no relevance to reality, and certainly a border poll, if it were to happen, would give a resounding result that we wanted to remain within the United Kingdom,” Foster said.
Sammy Wilson, a leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, said the threat of “rising tensions” between Catholics and Protestants, republicans and unionists, is “a despicable argument.”
“We don’t have a disaffected population. We won’t have a return to terrorism,” he said.