Brexit causes worries along Northern Ireland border

FLORENCECOURT, NORTHERN IRELAND» Farmer John Sheridan drives his mudcaked Land Rover up and down country lanes and roads, back and forth across the snaking border separating Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. There’s little sign he is crossing an international frontier.

But Sheridan remembers when this was a place of customs posts and troops. Since Britain voted to leave the European Union, he has feared Brexit could threaten the borderless life that he and his neighbors have built, putting up new barriers to trade and heightening political tensions in a region still moving on from decades of violence.

Looking out over a stretch of starkly beautiful grass and bogland where he raises sheep and cattle, 56year-old Sheridan said that during Northern Ireland’s violent “Troubles,” traveling between farms meant being “stopped here, there and everywhere” by army and police patrols.

“For about a mile and a half you went through semi-permanent checkpoints of British army in the north here, southern Irish army in the south,” he said.

“You were always conscious that you were in a war zone and you tried to be careful. Sometimes it was all right, and for other poor devils it wasn’t.”

Britain and the EU agreed Friday that after Brexit there must be no return to a “hard border” between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and Ireland, which will remain a member of the EU.

How that will happen has yet to be negotiated, but Sheridan said the breakthrough gives him “a certain amount of comfort” that the border will remain open.

Outside Northern Ireland, few people in Britain were thinking about the border when the country voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union. But the 310-mile line will be the United Kingdom’s only land border with an EU country once Britain leaves the now 28-nation bloc in March 2019.

Concern has been mounting here since the referendum about whether Brexit will mean a return to customs duties, vehicle checks and other border apparatus.

There has only been an international border in Ireland since 1921, after a war that saw mostly Catholic Ireland break free of Britain — apart from six counties in the Protestant-majority north, which remained in the U.K.

The border severed areas that had long been intertwined. The border began to blur after the EU’S single market for goods, services and people was born in 1993, with both Britain and Ireland among its members. There was no longer a need for customs posts.