Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Fears of bombs, bul returning to the bor
farmers and lorry drivers buy their dinner, a bottle of juice and a few sweets. “During the summer I have the ice cream machine going and that really helps but obviously, if there were to be checkpoints, they’re not going to be coming this way.
“This is my livelihood. I don’t know what I’d do, I never finished school. “I’m only 21 and I can’t imagine myself going back to school.” Another farmer living on the Armaghmonaghan border got a taste of The Troubles when a mock checkpoint and customs house was set up recently by the Garda and PSNI to gauge the impact it would have on traffic.
Arthur Hughes described how within minutes there was a tailback of trucks for miles – something that “just can’t happen” when you have fresh produce waiting to be delivered.
He said: “The uncertainty is a killer for everybody. People say they want to get the freshest product possible.
“We expect that for our customers when it leaves our yard but they’re not going to get that if it’s left sitting overnight.
“About three months ago there was a dummy checkpoint set up and it was chaos.”
Everyday routines such as moving silage a few hundred yards between his drystock farm in the South and his dairy farm in the North would hit his pocket hard.
He added: “We export our manure from the North and spread it in the South. We can’t pay contractors to sit in queues of traffic.”
And Arthur believes violence could be worse this time around.
He said: “It doesn’t take much for one side to have a tear at the other side and Brexit seems to be a political thing more so than anything else. If