Is milk or dogma the key to Ireland’s border?

There was a surprise waiting for Tom Treanor. The Irish dairy farmer had kindly agreed to drive me around his home near Clones in County Monaghan, on the Irish border, so that I could talk to people about Brexit.

We arrived at the house of his friend Maurice Hurst, a dairy farmer on the northern side in Lisnaskea, County Fermanagh, who describes himself as “a northern Protestant but not a loyalist”.

Mr Hurst climbed out from among his cows and, when Mr Treanor reminded him of our discussion topic, said cheerfully: “I actually voted Brexit.” Mr Treanor was visibly surprised. “Europe has had its best days,” Mr Hurst added. It’s now too “Left-leaning”.

Over the kitchen table and some very strong tea, it became clear that the two farmers, who only live 12 miles apart but never met growing up because of the border, have viscerally different reactions to the geopolitical shift around them.

Mr Hurst is relaxed. “I can’t conceivably see a border coming back,” he said.

Mr Treanor is worried. “We don’t need hindrances,” he said.

Both of them send their milk to cooperatives that operate on both sides of the border, though only Mr Hurst’s has to cross over to be processed. Still, he’s confident that the customs posts and soldiers won’t reappear – and pragmatic about what that involves.

If Northern Ireland has to stay in the customs union and have its goods checked as they cross the Irish Sea, that’s “the lesser of two evils”, he said. The farmers he knows are more worried about the price of land than Brexit.

That was not the story among most of the people I spoke to on the southern side. A friend of Mr Treanor’s, Ann O’harte, who rears chickens with her husband, is anxious about whether she will still be able to get quickly north to help her ageing mother.

Mr Treanor is worried that the EU will force Ireland to put up customs checks and that Britain will start buying its food elsewhere.

From the Republic of Ireland, the UK looks like a country gone rogue. It might have promised explicitly not to stop Brits and Irish travelling back and forth, but, from Ireland, Brexit is an incomprehensible, external force and there’s no telling where it might end up.

A few miles north, by contrast, Brexit is a question of common sense and though it might require some adjustment, it will be made to fit around life.

Amid all the wrangling in Brussels, legal dogma and political pride, politicians and bureaucrats should remember that the measure of their success won’t be the grandiosity of their projects or the eloquence of their speeches.

They’ll be judged on whether or not they can prove Mr Hurst right.

The road up to Clones from Dublin starts out as a motorway. But that only lasts an hour. For much of the second hour, you’re weaving up and down hills, one lane going each way. You get stuck behind milk tankers, horse trailers, lorries loaded up with straw bales and tractors. On a normal day, the journey from Dublin to Derry, about 140 miles, takes over three and a half hours.

In pure economic terms, the motorway should go all the way. But until 20 years ago, locals couldn’t even rely on the lanes joining up.

We drove to a little bridge on a narrow country lane. It doesn’t look like much, but it used to be the site of an ongoing tug o’ war between locals and the British Army, who had to police it because it joins the north and south.

Every so often, the soldiers would blow it up, forcing locals to travel 20 miles in order to get to a destination six miles away. Gradually, they would fill in the destroyed bridge with rocks and cement – until the soldiers noticed and blew it up again.

When the bridge was out of action, residents had to brave the checkpoints. Mr Treanor was never politically active, but his brother has done prison time for being in the IRA (he’s now a Sinn Fein councillor), so he dreaded the military checkpoints. If he wanted to go to the seaside, he had to drive through one.

“Ooh, your blood pressure would be raised here,” he said as he drove us past. Now, it’s just a row of houses. When the checkpoint disappeared, he would sometimes drive along the road just to prove he could. “It was wonderful,” he said – though it did take him a year or so to stop feeling nervous.

On the tops of the green hills on the northern side, wind turbines were spinning away, feeding electricity into one single grid for the whole island. For now, the motorway will have to wait.

Entrepreneurialism takes many forms. Not far from Clones, there’s a petrol station and hardware store that straddles the border. It has two pumps. One of them is on the northern side, the other on the southern.

The owner picks up fuel supplies from one of two depots and sells from one pump or the other depending on tax rates and the level of the euro and sterling.

Proof that tax and currency arbitrage trading isn’t just for bankers.