Brexit should not force our children to relive the heartbreak of the past in the North
IF THERE was a euro or pound for every glazed-over eye when Brexit (the laziest word-blend since Brangelina) was mentioned, we wouldn’t be worrying about borders and how we preferred them (hard or soft, ma’am?), because we’d emigrate, get the hell out of Ireland altogether.
But as much as we’d like to, we just can’t run from everything, much less our past. So we endeavour to move on, progress. And if we can’t forget the past then, for the sake of our children, forgive it. They shouldn’t have to relive all the hurt and bitterness not of their making.
But that’s exactly what Brexit is threatening to do – drag us back down a dark memory lane kicking and screaming to a non-abating time when every fox, man and proxy-child played endless catchme-if-you-can games with gardaí, RUC and customs men.
Growing up on the Irish Border during the 1970s and 1980s was like some Bermuda Triangle existence where people mysteriously disappeared and were never seen again. For the families of the missing, this is what a ‘hard’ Border looks like, feels like, regardless of its physical pull-down some 20 years ago in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement.
The local bog, where kids worked summers, became another twilight zone with British helicopters illegally flying into unapproved airspace and you unwittingly got assigned as a ‘lookout’ for the bog boss (a deaf IRA man in hiding, who lost his hearing in some botched backwater petrol station bombing), alerting him to the threat overhead. And as he scurried off like some cornered rat into the nearest hedge, we’d make hay, grabbing the unsurveilled few moments to partake in our own turf war, throwing sods at each other, boys against the girls.
That was our projection, our way of dealing with having to visit burial houses of our fathers’ friends, blown up while out tending to their cattle because they’d refused to pay ‘protection money’, a wholly deceptive racket of a term. But that’s what fear, anger and hate does – it makes people, families, turn on their own like disturbed ferrets that resort to eating their young.
Yet through all the bitterness, there was a strangely sweet side to the Border. In the forgotten unapproved village of Mullan on the Armagh Border, a stone’s throw from our family home in Emyvale, Co Monaghan, we’d cross a little bridge on foot (as no cars had access) and torture the little blind woman who owned the Crow’s Nest, a shop-cum-shebeen, for sweets not stocked in the south. Like braille, the protestant shop/landlady would rub the coins between her fingers to decipher if the currency was punt or sterling.
Another 4km to the other side was the Co Tyrone Border checkpoint in Aughnacloy, where the ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ twist would continue with the high-rising iron-clad watchtowers dominating the borderland skies doubling as a giant free-for-all sweetshop. Here, the young soldiers would fire packets of foreign-flavoured crisps into the passing southern cars and there’d be an almighty fight for the Golden Wonder sausage and tomato as we sneaked past customs with a contraband radio under the seat.
These random acts of kindness would soon leave a bad taste, sullied by the shooting dead of a young Sinn Féin election supporter on his way to a GAA match when a soldier’s gun ‘accidentally’ fired.
Suspicion and confusion rife, us kids didn’t know who we were but we knew who we were meant to be for. And with identity crisis comes shame. Shame for preferring the side you shouldn’t because it offered more colour, more fantasy.
CHILDREN innately seek out colour during dark times. Sometimes it’s the only protection available when a country’s at war. And, rightly or wrongly, north of the Border, with its rebellious red, white and blue-painted kerbs, had more of a lure for a southern child. Here they had fairytale weddings with real princes and princesses, but for every Charles and Di poster that hung from a northern telephone pole, less ceremonious posters hung from the southern poles.
And, as much as you tried not to look at the emaciated embattled hunger striker images of Kieran Doherty during that scorcher of ’81, you did and in that instant all fantasy and hope would die off.
Brexit, like every other issue of national interest, starts with a conversation we can all relate to, bring something to – but as soon as the political heads get their spins on it, we’re down another rabbit hole warbling on about customs unions, single markets and phase twos.
With the human thread long cut from the conversation, everything shifts towards power and who can get the most out of who in some deal that is meant to be in the best of all our interests.
Twenty years ago, when the Irish Border was finally ripped down, hope rose, healing began. We can’t go back.
Children innately seek out colour during dark times. Sometimes it’s the only protection available when a country’s at war