BUSINESS AND POLITICAL REACTION TO VOTE
WHAT WILL BREXIT MEAN FOR BORDER WORKERS
I like millions of others woke on Friday morning to find the world had changed, literally overnight.
It was unimaginable. The UK voting to leave the European Union. Surely not. The bookies had said it wouldn’t happen. My own colleagues had even told me that sense would prevail in the 11th hour. And I believed them.
But that passed, and the unthinkable had happened. And now where would we, and I say ‘we’ when I mean ‘I’, be after this day.
The reason any of this means so much is that I am one of those, you might call it, different breed of people from ‘ up north’ who criss crosses the border every day to work. I’m not alone, there are thousands of us. Sometimes we pass each other on the road, familiar cars, familiar times. Commuting is the same the world over I am sure.
But there is something unique about us. Technically - and I am taking politics out of it for a second - we leave one country to work in another, and then cross back again that evening. Yes, we are Irish, and proud of it. But living along the border, we have been forced to accept this complicated existence. The peace process did change much of that, bringing about a smoother transition for those who cross the border for work, leisure, shopping, or whatever they need to. We’ve got used to the free movement between north and south, Newry and Dundalk, Belfast and Dublin.
The possibilities for anyone wanting to work and live anywhere on the island were, it seemed to us, limitless.
But this, the ‘Brexit’ threatens to throw all that up in the air.
I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that, however ludicrous it might sound, the twenty mile journey to work on Friday would somehow change.
We had heard, and I have written many times in this newspaper over the last few months how Ireland would directly be affected, sharing as it does a land border with a part of the UK,
I felt fear, anxiety, and pure bloody uncertainty as I drove up onto the motorway. Would there be checkpoints, traffic gridlock? Would I need my passport? Would the feared ‘ hardening of the border’ begin today? And yes, I felt somewhat stupid when the motorway was, just as it always is, a clear run. The invisible border remained that way. For today at least.
But where exactly are we as the weeks and months ahead roll in? What kind of instability awaits for me and the tens of thousand of others, some of whom travel in the opposite direction to work in Newry or further north every day?
The answer, as it has been throughout the farcical Brexit campaign, is that we simply don’t know.