‘Brexit’ a risk to Irish peace
LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — Crossing the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic used to involve delays, checkpoints, bureaucratic harassment and the lurking threat of violence. That it’s now virtually seamless — that you can drive across without even knowing it — feels close to miraculous.
It is also one of the great successes of the Irish peace process of the last several decades. “It was like you had to climb over a locked gate,” George Fleming, president of the Londonderry Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview. “And then someone came and opened the gate.”
But as with so many British-related matters these days, “Brexit” — Britain’s divorce from the European Union — has thrown this hard-won arrangement into jeopardy.
If the British government succeeds in extricating itself from the European Union, the two parts of Ireland will lose one of their most important connective threads: a shared membership in the bloc. In an instant, one part of the island would be in Europe, and the other would not.
Established nearly 100 years ago according to political expedience rather than natural logic, the border — some 300 miles long, with about 210 crossings — is not easy to control, police or even always identify.
Reinstating a hard border, as residents call it, would have both psychological and practical implications. The movement of goods and services between north and south would become far more complicated with the introduction of new tariffs and customs regulations.
There are fears, too, about the return of armed guards and checkpoints, a resurgence of smuggling and other types of lawlessness, and a renewal of violence from dissident Irish republicans bound to chafe at signs of British control at the crossings.
“To reimpose the border is like putting up the Berlin Wall again, after you’ve taken it down,” said Fleming.
The island has been split in two since 1921 — the north, part of the United Kingdom and governed from London, and the south, a sovereign nation governed from Dublin.
The British government has sought to reassure border residents that their concerns are being heard. “Nobody wants to return to the borders of the past,” Prime Minister Theresa May said in January.
But May’s words have convinced few people here.