The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A ‘Brexit’ risk to Irish peace when it comes to the borders
Hard crossings could hurt peace it took years to build.
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 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, 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. (Many of the crossings are on tiny back roads.)
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, now commonplace and easy, 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 crossings.
Northern Ireland voted against Brexit in last year’s referendum. Polls show that for practicality’s sake, a majority of people in the region, whether they identify themselves as Irish or British, want the border to remain porous and fluid.
“To reimpose the border is like putting up the Berlin Wall again, after you’ve taken it down,” said Fleming, whose farm equipment company is based just 2 miles from the border.
He employs people from both north and south; does business in north and south (and abroad); and, along with some 325,000 other people per week, regularly drives back and forth, too many times to count, between the two places. His 96-year-old mother lives just across the border, in the republic.
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. Most of the U.K.-EU border is the waters of the English Channel; the only somewhat comparable land border is between Spain and the British territory of Gibraltar.
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, pledging to maintain the Common Travel Area, which allows citizens of the United Kingdom and the republic to travel back and forth without being subject to passport controls.
But May’s words have convinced few people here. One of the prime motivations for Brexit was Britain’s desire to re-establish sovereignty and retake control of its borders. People who live on either side of the divide wonder how Britain can possibly expect to achieve both things — put in a new hard border with Europe while maintaining the current openness.
They say, too, that easy statements from Westminster ignore hundreds of years of complicated history and show a failure to understand the intense emotions that Brexit has stirred up in a region scarred by the past.
Londonderry, for instance, is a predominantly Catholic city in a majority Protestant region with a long and bitter history of violent sectarian conflict. Ancient problems can seem very close to the surface here. But in recent years — and most dramatically since the enactment, in 1999, of the peace accord known as the Good Friday agreement — the city has made a remarkable turnaround.
Few people make a big deal now about the once life-ordeath question of what to call the city: Londonderry, its official name and the one Protestants traditionally prefer, or Derry, the Catholics’ favored name and the one by which it is generally known. Reflecting that both sides have a point, government organizations (and the BBC) have succumbed to practicality and often write it as “Derry/Londonderry.”
“There’s no trouble here anymore,” said Shauna McClenaghan, a civic leader in Inishowen, a nearby area of the republic that is intimately connected to Londonderry politically and culturally, despite being across the international border. “Derry’s just a city.”
Gerry Lynn, an amateur historian who leads tours at the Guildhall, the historic downtown building where the City Council meets, unleashed a condensed version of more than 1,000 extremely complex years of Irish history by way of explaining how far the country, and the region, have come since the Troubles (not to mention the 1600s).
“This city, this country, is like a woman who has given birth,” Lynn said. “All the trauma, the pain and the fighting are over. We’ve come out of the Troubles — out of black and white and into color.”
Now buses full of tourists from China and South America pour in to admire the 17th-century wall that surrounds the city, whose Protestant residents are still proud that it was never breached by Catholic forces during the Siege of Derry, in 1689. In 2013, the city became the U.K.’s first City of Culture.
In 2011, a pedestrian Peace Bridge, costing almost $22 million and financed in large part by European money, was built over the River Foyle, connecting the mostly Catholic city center to the more Protestant Waterside section in the east.
“Everyone’s so content with the peace we have here, and nobody really makes too much fuss about the politics except the politicians,” said Daphne Wilson, 50, who was ambling across the bridge the other day.
Though she voted for Brexit — “We don’t want pedophiles and terrorists coming here” — she believes that free movement back and forth has helped the two sides feel like part of a greater whole.
So does Toni Forrester, the chief executive of the chamber of commerce in Letterkenny, County Donegal, next door in the republic.
“We’ve worked so hard and so closely together to get cross-border cooperation working,” she said.
As an example, she mentioned a new medical-imaging center in Londonderry that is open to patients from the republic.
“You can have a heart attack in Donegal and be treated in Derry,” she said.
Community leaders worry that much of the delicate progress of the last couple of decades — the softening of entrenched prejudices, the gradual moves toward reconciliation — could be shattered by the reintroduction of an us-versus-them mentality that a harder border would bring.
“This area benefits from EU funding, from peace programs that benefit north and south promoting the notion that we have more in common than we have differences,” McClenaghan said.