Extreme solutions will not be good for us

T the end of his interview with RTE Six One News on Friday night Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, having tried to paint the most positive picture he could at the bombshell that was dropped the previous day by the British electorate, revealed a very worrying caveat that seems to have escaped the notice of most commentators.

The Minister revealed that he had been in Germany in the days before the British vote and was struck by the determination of the Germans to seal all EU borders within Europe ever more tightly.

Clearly the masses arriving from Syria and beyond is the motivation behind the Germans desire to seal the EU borders, but evidently they never envisaged that one of those borders, indeed one of the longest, between the EU and a non EU member, would be the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

That prospect now looms very large following the British decision to exit the EU, and if the Germans get their way - which they usually do - then the consequences for this part of the country are frightening.

Certainly Minister Noonan is old enough, but perhaps not all that familiar in that he lived most of his life in the southern part of the country, to remember vividly enough the problems that border controls imposed on the people of this area.

Indeed there was a time when a person living in the Republic had to have their travel documents stamped in and out of the North, and if they returned to the Republic after the midnight closing time for the NI Customs post they faced consequences.

Long queues were a regular occurrence that frequent cross-border travellers experienced, especially at peak holiday periods, and who will ever forget the lines of lorries that made life intolerable for residents of the Dowdallshill area and all traffic as drivers waited for Customs clearance from revenue officials.

We are told that it will never come to that, and that customs clearance for goods can now be processed by computer systems rather than by manual inspection but they also told us that Britain would never vote to leave the EU.

They have, and we in Border areas face a new reality.

That reality, which worries us most is not just the end of the free movement of people and goods, but that stark realisation that many migrants, seeking access to Britain, will see the route through the Republic to Northern Ireland and beyond to Britain as their most opportune route.

To counter that very real prospect the British, if they are to keep their promise to the 16 million who voted to leave the EU mainly because of emigration, will have no real alternative other than to seal the border with the Republic.

It will, as we all know from our experience during the height of the Troubles, and unquestionably the British know too, be virtually impossible to seal the border between the two parts of Ireland unless they erected a wall along the scale of the Isreali West Bank (430 miles) to separate them from the Palestinians.

That quite horrific prospect will no doubt be mooted by the extreme elements that see Boris Johnston as their saviour, and will ignore not only the very real prospect of massive disruption to every day life in this area, but will also fuel Republican extremists who, as the British have experienced, will never shy about taking their fight to the streets of their cities.

It is quite simply the biggest problem that has faced this area in my life time, and one that will take a great deal of negotiations and goodwill to solve, with the obvious worry that we do not have a strong enough or stable enough government to negotiate on our behalf, and that there may well be another agenda for some at the heart of the entire debate.

Quite coincidentally, but very appropriately there was a thought in Sunday’s second reading at Mass (St. Paul to the Galatians) which read “if you go snapping at each other and tearing each other to pieces, you had better watch or you will destroy the whole community”.

The community that lives along both sides of our border, and who live in harmony, will hope that the views of the Germans and the extreme elements in Britain won’t prevail and that sensible solutions can be found to a problem that at this moment looks insoluble.