How Brexit will bring chaos to our border area
There are 208 places to cross
IRELAND has 208 border crossings, the first officially agreed count since the island was partitioned almost a century ago has found. Emails between government technicians who have been carrying out the painstaking process reveal they endured a ‘nightmare’ trying to definitively map out all roads, paths and dirt tracks that traverse the 500km frontier.
The final figure will confirm there are more border crossings in Ireland than the 137 along the entire border between the EU and all the countries to the east of the bloc.
As well as technical limitations, confusion reigned over crossings where the border runs up the middle of roads, juts in and out of routes or where roads are privately owned on one side and publicly maintained on the other.
The findings may come as little comfort to politicians advocating a technology-based solution to avoiding a hard border when the UK pulls out of the Customs Union.
The joint-mapping exercise, involving the Department of Transport and the North’s Department of Infrastructure, started last year. It came to light after being referred to in minutes of a meeting of transport chiefs, under the heading ‘Brexit’, released following a freedom of information request.
And newly-disclosed documents charting the process since then show that the border runs along the middle of 11 roads – more than twice the number originally believed, that the frontier meets in the middle of at least three bridges and that it dissects two ferry crossings. On one same section of the Dublin-to-Belfast motorway, traffic travelling in one direction is in the north while those travelling the opposite direction are in the south, the documents, also released under freedom of information, reveal.
It is ‘half north and half south’, an official says.
Previous estimates put the number of road crossings between Ireland and the North – the UK’s only land border with the EU – at 275. But in one of the final emails over recent weeks between Dublin and Belfast, signing off on the first agreed count, an official concludes: ‘I’m now getting 208 border crossings in total, hope you are too.’ The North’s Department of Infrastructure said it is anticipated the final report will be made publicly available within the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, Simon Coveney has rejected a suggestion by DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds that the Government is discussing the ‘annexation’ of the North.
The Tánaiste and Foreign Affairs Minister said Mr Dodds’ words were ‘inflammatory’ and he insisted the Republic’s position had neither softened nor hardened during ongoing negotiations. Mr Dodds told the website Conservative Home: ‘They’ve talked about almost the annexation of Northern Ireland.’
But Mr Coveney, speaking after attending a lunch with business leaders in Derry yesterday, said: ‘We’re not looking to use Brexit to promote any kind of constitutional change on the island of Ireland, not at all.’