Naomi O’Leary:
Did you know you can know support us on Patreon? Our Patreon is page www.patreon.com/theirishpassport. Enjoy the episode. Hello, welcome to Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney: [/skipto]:
Let’s do it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Welcome to the Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
I’m Tim McInerney.
Naomi O’Leary:
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
Tim McInerney:
We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi?
Naomi O’Leary:
Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3. OK. So, yes, welcome. We have decided to make this podcast series about Ireland, which is called The Irish Passport. Just to introduce myself, ‘m a reporter. My experience is that when it comes to any given Irish current event or news, you immediately need to start looking back and giving the historical context, because it’s all about the unresolved questions of history that are still playing out. So, that’s what we want to do. We want to link the current events to the history that preceded them.
Tim McInerney:
So, each week we’ll choose a theme to discuss on a topic of Irish culture, history and politics. We’ll be looking at issues like the Irish language, drinking culture, Guinness, the Famine, the 1916 Rising, Irish music, Irish literature. And look at how all these issues are reflected in the modern politics of Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
We’d especially like to hear suggestions from you about what we should talk about in the future. We should also say that neither of us are experts or claim to be experts, so this is a journey for us too and we want to bring in as many diverse voices and experiences as we can.
Tim McInerney:
So, if you have any suggestions for things you’d like to hear about or if you think that we’ve missed out on anything important, you can write to us at theirishpassport@gmail.com. That’s “theirishpassport”, all one word, at g-mail.com.
Naomi O’Leary:
So, Tim, let’s start at the beginning. What is Ireland anyway?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, what is Ireland anyway? We had to choose this because this can actually be a little bit more difficult than it seems but anyone from Ireland who has been abroad has probably had a little bit of a shock when they realised that lots of people, even some of our close neighbours, don’t always realise that Ireland is an independent state or else they might be asked with a bit of a wry look, “Are from Northern Ireland” “Are you from Southern Ireland”, and you get the feeling sometimes when you ask questions like this that the people who are asking might not exactly know the significance of what that might mean.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, for sure. And I mean it away, fair enough, like we are a pretty small island, but there are definitely a range of reactions that people can have when you tell them that you’re from Ireland. You do sometimes get an odd reaction, which is like, you know, you say you’re from Ireland or whatever, and they kind of go, “Ooo”, as if you’ve said something sort of controversial, like, you know, the existence of Ireland is a contentious question, somehow. Let’s just establish what are the facts. So, when people talk about Ireland, the country, usually they are talking about the Republic of Ireland which is an independent state and a member of the European Union and the Eurozone, so we use euros as a currency. This stage takes up most but not all of the island of Ireland and the island of Ireland is the neighbouring island to Britain.
Tim McInerney:
Okay. And this is the big one to take away if you want to win points with your Irish friends. Right. The Republic of Ireland, which covers most of the island, is a totally separate state to the United Kingdom. So, when I say totally separate, I mean, it’s as separate as, say, Germany and France or the US and Canada. Ireland and the U.K. use different currencies. They have different political systems, different units of measurement even, we use the metric system while the U.K. still uses the imperial system quite a bit. And Ireland is, of course a Republic, so it doesn’t have a queen, it has a president instead whose official title actually, in Irish, is Uachtarán na hÉireann.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, our president is actually really lovely. His name is Michael D Higgins and he’s known with affection as Michael D, for short. This is a man who could 100 percent be an extra on Lord of the Rings, but I myself am a pretty small woman, and when I met him, he was almost exactly my same height, so roughly about five-foot-tall — a bit of leftover imperial measurements there. He’s a poet and he delivers like the most lovely, kind of soothingly nuanced intellectual speeches on the issues of the day and he kind of bursts into Irish ship points during the speech as if, you know, like the English language just can’t contain what he’s trying to convey. But to get back to what is Ireland, definitely, I think part of the confusion is that on the island of Ireland, of course, there are two political entities. There’s the Republic and then there’s Northern Ireland, which, of course, is part of the U.K.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, absolutely. And I might mention there that night when Naomi says that when I met the president, now she’s not being ostentatious at all. This is the benefits of having a country with 5 million people, you meet the president, you know, every now and again. I think I’ve seen all the presidents that have been alive in my lifetime.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh my god. You’re doing much better than me. I’ve only met one.
Tim McInerney:
But you see them around as well, you know, just, you know, walking down the street sometimes amazingly. But anyway, I think the biggest thing that confuses people about what exactly Ireland is, is that the U.K., our closest neighbour, actually comprises four separate nations, one of which is Northern Ireland which is located on the north-east corner of the island of Ireland. It shares a border with the Republic. So, along with England, Scotland and Wales, Northern Ireland is under the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. So when you step over the border on the island of Ireland, between the Republic and Northern Ireland, that is an international border. You’re stepping into another country.
Naomi O’Leary:
And I think there is a common misconception which I’ve come across recently, which is when people think of the island, they often imagine that Northern Ireland is like the north half of the island a bit sort of like North Korea. It’s just cut off in the middle. But actually, it’s a small section of the island on the north-east. As you said, it doesn’t actually touch the West Coast at all, so it’s surrounded on two sides completely by the Republic in a kind of a C-shape. So, it takes up most, but not all of the ancient Irish province of Ulster.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And often people use the word Ulster to stand in for Northern Ireland, which can be even more confusing, but in fact, some of Ulster is in the Republic. And weirdly, some of the Republic is actually further north than Northern Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
This brings us to the theme of this first episode. We want to talk about that border, that complex, winding, contested border that stretches between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Let’s hear it from a local.
George Colgan:
Take a tin of spaghetti and just spread it out, that’s the road so I’m between, that spaghetti is the field and you don’t know whether you’re in North or South.
Naomi O’Leary:
So, like a tin of spaghetti tipped out with the border running along through the middle somewhere. That’s a man who has to cross the border four times to get to his nearest town because it weaves back and forth across the road along the way. We’ll hear more from him later. But why is so irregular? It follows the course of old Irish county boundaries. And if you were to lift it up like a string and stretch it out straight, it would actually be 500 kilometres long, which is longer than the island itself from top to bottom. It was formed about 100 years ago and it’s been one of the most sensitive issues in Irish politics ever since. Tim is going to tell us a little bit about this history. So, why is there a border in the first place?
Tim McInerney:
Right. Well, it’s a big question and there’s a short answer to it and there’s a long one. The short answer is that an international border came into effect on the island in 1922, that was when most of Ireland effectively left the United Kingdom. The longer answer, which could go on forever, is that this division actually goes back 400 years. We won’t be able to look at all the events that led to the border in this one podcast, so I thought we’d just focus a little bit on the origins of the cultural divide between North and South in Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK. Well, something that I find fascinating, particularly for me to see in Northern Ireland, is how the architecture of division, so physical walls actually separating communities is still in place. There are walls called peace walls that separate Protestant communities and Catholic communities. And this is hundreds of years after the wars of religion that tore through the rest of Europe. But there is a bit of a misconception here, isn’t there? Protestant and Catholic are used as shorthand for the divisions in Northern Ireland but the conflict between them isn’t over religion. There’s definitely a misunderstanding that it was, I think. For example, recently I’ve noticed on social media there’s a lot of casual comparisons made between the IRA and ISIS, the Islamic State, but it really doesn’t make sense to compare the IRA to Islamic State. I mean, ISIS, they claim to be acting in the name of their religion to achieve religious goals and they want to establish a caliphate. The IRA, yes, it happens to come from, mostly from the Catholic community, but their aims weren’t religious. They were political. And they wanted to basically remove the border. They wanted an all island, united Ireland of both Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Tim McInerney:
Right. And I think the use of religion to categorise each side in the conflict can actually get a little bit facile. At the end of the day, this was always, above all, a territorial dispute. Since the border was drawn, Northern Ireland has been in this drawn out tug-of-war between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. That said, because of the region’s history, the two sides in this conflict are easily characterised by their religion. Most unionists, that’s the people who want to remain in the United Kingdom , are Protestant. Most Republicans, who want to join the Republic, are Catholic. Now, there is a big overlap of lots of Catholics who are unionist and a lot of Protestants who are nationalist as well. But there are also loads of disputes around this question which extend way beyond religious identity. So, it’s bringing it down to two very simple terms to simply consider this as some kind of religious war.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, it’s something I’ve noticed, particularly among young people actually. But let’s go back 400 years. Let’s rewind. How did this all get started?
Tim McInerney:
Right. Well, we can consider this really at the beginning as a geopolitical awkwardness of Ireland. The northern half of Europe, including Britain, broke away from the Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages, more or less. It took a while. It took a few centuries for it to really happen. And we could kind of see this breaking away from the Catholic Church back then as a sort of Brexit, really, it’s actually very, I mean, I’m not the only one who’s made this comparison, I’ve heard it a bit actually in recent times because it’s a very interesting comparison. The religion of England became one and the same with the English state. This is a single Protestant country breaking away from a huge pan-European alliance, basically taking tax laws and social regulations away from Europe and maundering by itself. So,
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s fascinating.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it’s quite interesting. Now, one of the big security risks that Protestant England had during this big break with Catholic Rome was Ireland. It’s this little Catholic island that’s just floating right beside the island of Britain.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay, so Ireland was like vulnerable flank, basically where the enemies of Britain could kind of use it as an invasion point or a jump-off point to attack Britain. And so that was the reason why they needed to gain control of it.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, exactly. And they had been trying to gain control of it in lots of different ways for quite some time. But what we’re talking about today really is a result of the manner in which this was done and its long-term effects. For quite some time that the native Irish, which was what they were known as at the time, were quite hostile to the British crown, even though theoretically the country had been claimed as an English colony for hundreds of years. So, the British government attempted to solve the Irish problem, the problem of Catholic Ireland with a huge colonial experiment that some of our listeners might have heard about before, actually. These are the so-called plantations. This was like a subsidized colonization scheme. So, if you were an English or a Scottish landholder, Britain could offer you a huge parcel of land in Ireland and invite you over to settle it. The idea was that this was land that was there for the taking.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. And that’s like a golden ticket in this period of history, right? Because land is, like, the number one resource and if you have it, you’re moving up the social scale, I think, right? Would it be fair to say that the settlers who were brought into Northern Ireland under this system, were they similar to those who were setting off to colonize North America?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, more or less. Just like you say, land is indeed, I mean, gold. So, these people, much like people who went to the American colonies, a lot of them were adventurers. They were looking to make money, but also similar to the American colonies, a lot of them were also religious radicals who saw Ireland as their Promised Land. And a lot of people made the step actually from Northern Ireland to America afterwards. Okay, you might have heard Americans describe themselves as Scotch-Irish. And this is what they mean. They mean that they were descendants of actual planters who had come to Northern Ireland originally from Scotland. So, the only condition you have to fulfil to take up one of these plantations is that you had to be Protestant, you had to speak English and be willing to teach English, actually — there’s even amazing English language teaching manuals in existence from the plantations.
Naomi O’Leary:
Wow.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, you teach English and you convert people at the same time. It’s a two in one stone. And of course, you had to be loyal to the British crown. You had to bring people with you. You have to bring a certain amount of families and a certain amount of men to form a small local army.
Naomi O’Leary:
Well, so interestingly, this is where we have the origins of these whole different communities. So, you have these new plantation people and they have a different religion and they speak a different language and they’re side by side with the so-called native Irish.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Absolutely. And the religion really is like a wall of fire between the two communities because that’s a boundary that you don’t cross at this time. We also must remember, of course, that when the colonists arrived in in Ireland in the 17th century, the Irish was still living according to Gaelic laws and Gaelic customs. They wouldn’t have had any major road systems or urban developments. The people in Ireland at this time would have been almost exclusively speaking Irish, so it would have felt very like colonial America, a kind of a wild land. These colonists would have very much considered themselves as civilizers as of this savage territory. Of course, from the Irish point of view, their land was simply being occupied. The native Irish were largely driven off the land because planters were given financial reward if they only took on British Protestant tenants and workers. One of the aims of this experiment was really to replace the population entirely and like I say, this manner of colonization really is what leads to this sense of segregation between the two communities.
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s fascinating, especially since, for example, if you visit a city like Derry, the remnants of that time are completely visible. I mean, it’s a walled, fortified, small city that was built by these settlers that is lined with cannons pointed out towards the hills beyond, where I suppose the native Irish would have been pushed out to. And even today, there are still people there who, you know, identify strongly with Britain. And they, and the wall says that they’re still under siege, which is just, it’s just amazing that this history is still playing out. But why was it that this plantation was only confined to the north-east corner of the country?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, this is one of the weird quirks actually of the colonial experiment. These colonies functioned extremely well in North America because, of course, most of the native peoples there died of disease, so it was very —
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh my god.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at some points in the beginning, we’re talking about 90 percent of Native Americans on the east coast who were dying of disease. It’s really incomparable the success that was had in North America. Of course, the native Irish were immune to European diseases. So, the colonists didn’t have the same advantage. More or less, they simply just run out of steam and by the mid 17th century, England is falling into a civil war and attentions are really being directed elsewhere, and those colonies in the north of Ireland get a little bit forgotten about.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, I can see that trend continuing up to the present day. So, alright. You’ve got this section of the island that’s in a very divided state with communities that are like starkly at odds living side by side. Meanwhile, the rest of Ireland, it isn’t quite the same, is it? It keeps having rebellions over the centuries and movements and political currents that are continually pressing for self-rule and trying to throw off Britain. And this kind of comes to a head during the First World War to kind of skip forward. Basically, there was the 1916 rebellion, of course, and rebels declared an independent Irish state and that led to the Irish war of independence from Britain. When this happened, was it somewhat inevitable that there was going to have to be a difficult reckoning with the fact that there were these majority Protestant areas in Ulster?
Tim McInerney:
Yes. And of course, there are loads of different events that ultimately led to the partition of Ireland in 1922. But you have this base template of two cultures on the island, which really puts down the groundwork for what the future of the independent state is going to be. We have to remember that the divisions between the two cultures actually got more and more divided as the southern part of Ireland became more invested in a narrative of rebellion and a narrative of anti-Britishness. So, if we fast-forward up to the early 20th century, just after the 1916 Rising, and indeed just before the 1916 Rising, the Protestants in Ulster had already vowed never to join an independent state.
Naomi O’Leary:
So, they knew which way the wind was blowing.
Tim McInerney:
They did indeed, because even before the war of independence that happened in Ireland, there was talk about perhaps Ireland getting a kind of measure of independence, a Home Rule state, as they called it, which is something like what Scotland has now, a kind of devolved government. And when the Protestants in Ulster even heard about this, they started importing arms to fight back against any possible rebellion. And there was a real risk during the war of independence that the Protestants in the North part of Ireland might actually enter into a civil war with the Catholics in the South.
Naomi O’Leary:
Gosh. So, essentially what happened then was the solution was sort of cobbled together in 1922. That’s the date when we had this agreement between Britain and the newly forming Irish state, but this, it was pretty controversial, right?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it was controversial. And it was cobbled. This Anglo-Irish treaty split the rebel movement in two, because so many people disagreed with it. And it was the agreement that ultimately created the first independent Irish state in 1922. So, one of the clauses in the treaty was that a border would be drawn around the Protestant areas of Ulster and that the people within this border could, if they wished, opt-out of the independent state that was being created.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. And I take it that they decided to do that.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, of course. Of course, they opted out of this. And this was no surprise to anyone because the border had been drawn specifically, in fact, to ensure that the population within the border would have a huge Protestant majority, who would have been overwhelmingly for staying within the United Kingdom. So, the border was created and that part of Ireland, now officially named Northern Ireland, was split off from the rest of the island, which became a free state.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so now you’ve got an independent state to the south of the border and that’s majority Catholic. And it’s kind of creating an identity for itself in opposition to Britain. And then in the north, you’ve got this majority Protestant part, which is very pro-British.
Tim McInerney:
Absolutely. And this further explains why Protestant and Catholic are so often used to describe these two opposing sides in the conflict. In fact, since there was such a clear split along the lines of religion, the religions themselves both became quite powerful, quite domineering, with quite a homogenous population to control. In the independent state, which would become known as the Republic later on, the Catholic Church was given control of practically all schools, all of the public institutions, and really it established a kind of theocracy that went on right up until the 1990s and I’m sure that this is something we’ll get to talk about loads in future episodes.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, and of course, this made Protestants north of the border even more entrenched in their unionism to make sure that that they weren’t forced to take part in this Catholic theocracy to the south. And the Catholics who lived north of the border in Northern Ireland were for many decades treated like second-class citizens in public and political life.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. So, it kind of remained this enclave of division. And it was, I mean I think it was just the deep injustices of this society where Catholics were excluded from full participation that kind of sparked off the civil rights movements in the in the 60s that was to grow into outright conflict later. But something that struck me, for sure, is how impractical this border is. It’s so incredibly jaggered and complicated. People’s properties and lives criss cross it completely and there’s hundreds of official roads and many unofficial crossing points. And when I say roads, we’re talking about, you know, only one car can cross at a time. So, how do people imagine when this border was formed that it would ever be workable or policeable as an international border?
Tim McInerney:
Right. Yeah. I mean, the problem is, I suppose, that they didn’t imagine it very well. The border was a subject of lots of petty disputes. Before the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the border was going to cut off all of Ulster, which would have made a little bit more sense, but this wouldn’t have had the Protestant majority that the British wished for in the Anglo-Irish Agreement. So, a lot of the drawing of the border and a lot of the practicalities, like you say, of the border are actually down to quite impractical desires. Many people on both sides expected that the border wouldn’t be there for very long. They expected that either the independent state would fail and that it would re-join the Union. Or they expected that the United Kingdom would eventually just relinquish control of Northern Ireland and that it would join the Republic. But as it happens, neither of these things ever happened and life on either side of the border then became increasingly divergent with each passing generation. So —
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s really interesting that you bring up the demographics as well, and the reason why it was created in the way it was, was to preserve this majority. Particularly given that we’re speaking in April 2017, there was just recently an election in Northern Ireland in which for the first time in history — the first time since the creation of this political unit –the unionist parties in the assembly there, Stormont, lost their majority.
Tim McInerney:
These demographics are actually key to the existence of Northern Ireland. One of the great changes in Northern Ireland today is a shift in demographics, which is reflected, as we’ll see, in the Good Friday agreement that brought peace to the province.
Naomi O’Leary:
I have the figures here. OK, so when Northern Ireland was first formed, Protestants were in the clear majority, around 70 percent. But in the most recent census in 2011, that majority had gone down significantly to 48 percent, with Catholics just behind on 45 percent. Now, the Good Friday Agreement allows for Northern Ireland to democratically unify with the Republic of Ireland if a majority there is in favour. If you look at the falling numbers of Protestants, you might think that that might be almost inevitable, but you have to remember that people’s religion does not map perfectly onto their political beliefs. So, even though the 2011 census found 45 percent of people were Catholic, it only found 25 percent of people who identified as Irish only. There was 21 percent who identified as something different, Northern Irish. According to the polling we have, there isn’t nearly a majority in favour of a united Ireland, but support for it does appear to be increasing since Brexit.
Tim McInerney:
It’s amazing really. When you cross the border today, you are really crossing between two very distinct countries. You drive just a few minutes up a road, and you’ll notice the traffic sign will change from kilometres to miles. Your phone will tell you, “Welcome to the United Kingdom” If you’re crossing from the Republic, and the opposite vice-versa. The street signs will be different designs, in a different metal. And of course, you have different prices in British pounds. And that’s how the situation is as it stands today.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. And we’ll hear a little bit in the next section about how the people who live along there have adjusted their lives to adapt to this. So, they do their shopping on either side, depending on where the best bargain is, and they cross back and forth, not even really thinking of it as a border at the moment because it’s so invisible. Of course, it wasn’t always like this. It has been a deeply divisive and contested border for much of its existence. And of course, during the troubles which we referenced, which was that period of conflict between those two communities in Northern Ireland, the border saw some of the worst of the violence. But in recent years since the Good Friday agreement, the old British military checkpoints and watch towers have been dismantled. It’s just become completely easy for people to cross back and forth across the border and there’s free movement of people and trade because after all, Ireland and the U.K. have both been members of the European Union and single market. Now, of course.
Tim McInerney:
Dun-dun-dun.
Naomi O’Leary:
This may be about to change. So, yes, the U.K. voted to leave the European Union in a referendum and Ireland is staying in it, so that border might be about to get an upgrade from an international division which nobody thought would last to a land border of the world’s biggest trading bloc. I have been reporting along the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, talking to local people to get a sense of how they are reacting to Brexit. While the U.K. as a whole voted to leave the European Union, a majority of voters in Northern Ireland actually voted to remain, and Northern Ireland and people along this border might be affected by Brexit more than anyone else. If you have to explain to someone who isn’t familiar with the area where you live in, could you describe a little bit what it’s like?
George Colgan:
Ah, it’s very hard to explain to somebody who doesn’t live around here. Well, anyway I could explain it as like, take tin of spaghetti and just spread it out, that’s the road so I’m in between, that spaghetti is the field and you don’t know whether you’re in North or South. Where I live here, I can look at the border in about three or four different ways. You know, if I go north, I can look at it, if I can so south, I can look at it, if I go west and go back into the north again .
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s George Colgan, a father of five who lives just inside Northern Ireland. To get to his nearest town, he has to cross the border four times in about ten minutes because it’s so irregular, it weaves back and forth across the road. This is a landscape where people lived their lives crossing this boundary. They might work on one side and live on another. They might buy petrol in euros in Ireland and then bread in sterling the next village down. But decisions that could turn all of this upside down are being worked out in negotiating rooms, caraway in London and Brussels.
Bernie Mullally:
You know, they’re even saying that say you walk across the border, you know, with your dog as local people would do, you know, because it’s a very scenic area, that you might even be stopped bringing your dog across or at least you’d have to have some paperwork and some checks. It’s totally frightening to think of checks that there’s going to be.
Naomi O’Leary:
You heard Bernie Mullally speaking there. She runs a bed and breakfast called Abocurragh and Fermanagh on the Northern Ireland side of the border. Her home is also a working dairy farm where she runs with her husband, Jerry. They rely on cross-border tourism and they take their milk to be processed in the Republic of Ireland. Currently, there’s no customs barrier to cross because both the U.K. and the Ireland are in the customs union. But the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, has said that the U.K. will be pulling out of that as part of Brexit. What that means for Bernie and Jerry is unclear. The U.K., Ireland and the EU have all paid lip service to avoiding a so-called hard border, but there’s been absolutely no detail on how this will be avoided once this border becomes the edge of the EU single market. Currently borders like this means customs checks, they mean passport checks, and depending on the country of origin, they can mean paying tariffs on goods. And then there’s the issue of actually enforcing any such rules. Not so long ago, this border used to be patrolled by the British military and even then, movement across it was never fully under control.
Pat Treanor:
What is it, 310 mile? There are plenty of fields and bridges over rivers, and even from, in houses from the front door to the back door can be the border can be in between. So of course, people will be, will find a bit of ingenuity to go about their business and the black market will thrive.
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s the voice of Pat Treanor, a local councillor for Sinn Féin. It’s a party that opposes the existence of the border at all and they’re dedicated to uniting north and south into one united Ireland. Sinn Féin were once known as the political arm of the IRA. I met Treanor in the town of Clones, just inside the Republic of Ireland. He invited me in for a chat and a cup of tea in a centre for former Republican prisoners. As we spoke, the faces of people who had starved themselves to death in protest at British policies looked down on us from the walls. I asked Treanor about how the border is remembered locally.
Pat Treanor:
Older people’s memories, there are two types of border. Back before recent phases of the conflict, In ’68, ’69, you had ordinary customs huts, where you had the police, a customs man out with a, stamping in your car when you were driving into the north and stamping it out, when you’re coming out. Not very intrusive, and many people found including myself when I was young, you found ways to smuggle whatever was the most suitable commodity. It was usually butter or sugar or something like that — it was innocent enough type of activity for young people. But then came the closing of the roads and the British security response to the conflict, which really put a very, a division between communities here. And out of the eight roads out of Clones, five of them went to County Fermanagh. So, and I think it’s when two of them were opened, the others were blocked off by roads being blown up or barriers put on the roads. It’s very, very fresh in people’s memories. When the roads were closed, the checkpoints, British army checkpoints were at the road there, people were funnelled through large military checkpoints where, you know, some people were harassed, particularly young people were picked on.
Naomi O’Leary:
Back in those days, some locals would come out and illicitly repair the blown-up roads or remove the barriers using their own machinery. It was a cat and mouse affair. The military would often block the roads again the next day. Treanor was involved in these efforts and he’s missing a finger to show for it. It happened back in 1994 when he was arrested close to a border crossing. Gunman with the IRA opened up fire on a squad car and accidentally hit Treanor. His finger had to be amputated. Do you get the sense that there is an appreciation in London for how a hard border that they’re talking about would actually affect people’s lives here?
Pat Treanor:
Absolutely not. I don’t think they have a clue. I don’t think they actually care one bit about it. It would be an absolute disaster. And I know that many people talk about, you know, the tariffs and the trade and the numbers of, the millions or billions, that’s crossing the border; the 30,000 workers who come and go every day, but really for local communities and it has the potential to create divisions, obviously, create friction. Be a major step backwards that refocuses on partition and on the border. It’s like asking Germany or telling Germany to rebuild the Berlin Wall. Do we go out and protest? Do we close the roads? Do we take over whatever property or land that the customs department is going to build their customs huts on? Do we do a peace camp on their sites? All of that is really a live issue within the community. How are we going to deal with it? Because, you know, people are prepared to go to long lengths to try and ensure that we don’t go backwards.
Naomi O’Leary:
When you read the mood now, what’s your assessment of the risk of a return to violence?
Pat Treanor:
I suppose it depends on what conditions are created. You know, if customs or whatever border were to be introduced and it turns out that there are military armed people on it and not treating the people like they used to treat the people, that would create conditions. But I don’t see any great desire by anywhere, by anyone to get involved in armed conflict of any sort.
Naomi O’Leary:
Today, the roads around Clones are lined with black and yellow posters announcing the roads will be closed. They’re designed to look like official notices, but they’re actually protest posters put up by the Border Communities Against Brexit campaign. The sense of change, the sense of old political questions being asked again is everywhere. George Colgan, who we heard earlier, is in his mid-fifties. One of his earliest memories is of a border crossing close to his house being blown up. He was in primary school and the explosion woke him up in the middle of the night. He’s lived through the checkpoints. He has bitter memories of being held up and detained. I asked him nowadays what local people are talking about.
George Colgan:
Brexit, I’d say mostly all the time. Brexit. Brexit. Brexit.
Naomi O’Leary:
Is there a bit of a sense of uncertainty?
George Colgan:
There’s a bit of the sense of a united Ireland coming, you know, for us Catholics living on the border. I think it’s going to be different, isn’t it?
Naomi O’Leary:
Can you remember another time in your life when it seemed more feasible, a united Ireland?
George Colgan:
No. I feel we’re the closest now than we ever were.
Tim McInerney:
We talked about history at the beginning of this podcast, but it’s been pretty amazing to witness history unfold right in front of us over the course of this Brexit process. For the benefit of our listeners, at the time that we’re recording this, the U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has just triggered Article 50, so the U.K. exit from the EU has just become official, and it looks like there’s no going back. But, like in retrospect since you made that report, do you think things have gotten better or worse now since the vote?
Naomi O’Leary:
So, what’s clear now is that this is just going to be an incredibly complicated negotiating process. So, they, the U.K. and the EU have two years to figure out everything. And, you know, the economic implications of this and, you know, all round everything to do with it is just so incredibly complicated that the question of the border is, it threatens to be overshadowed by just the sheer complexity of everything else. Now, the Irish government had what it claimed was a minor victory in that in the kind of letter of intent that opened negotiations and, you know, by the EU, there was a specific mention of the border and of the Good Friday Agreement and of the importance of preserving peace in the region. But interestingly enough, immediately is that, after that letter was published, the attention didn’t go to Northern Ireland, it went to Gibraltar. You know, which is the territory attached to Spain, which is still under British sovereignty. There’s even been talk of that, Britain would be prepared to go to war over it and to me that the focus on Gibraltar tells me that, you know, there still isn’t quite the level of attention on Northern Ireland that you would expect, given that it is an integral home part of the U.K., and you know, it’s a problem that’s on the doorstep. The sort of lack of attention towards was striking throughout the campaign and it’s still striking now. And I’d be really interested to see how this changes once this, you know, the reality of the situation becomes apparent to London.
Tim McInerney:
Right. And this issue of the majority then in Northern Ireland, of course, rears its head again. We might mention, we touched on it before the report, but that the majority decision in Northern Ireland is central to the peace agreement that was made in 1998. And the idea was that if a majority of people in Northern Ireland decided to join the Republic, that this could happen. But now it feels like they’re being pushed a little bit from left field, that they might be making this decision based on things that are happening in the U.K. And I think this maybe has come as a bit of a shock to the Republic as well as to Northern Ireland. How do you think the Republic would cope if the border ceased to exist?
Naomi O’Leary:
Well, I think that what’s really interesting now is that you do have discussions about the border coming up at all. Prior to this, it was just a question that didn’t people didn’t really talk about and that suited people very well because it’s been a question that’s caused a lot of unhappiness and a lot of grief and a lot of violence in the past. And people were kind of happy to put it to bed and get to the, you know, the questions of kind of everyday governance as much as they could even though, you know, Northern Ireland has struggled with that, nonetheless. But yet this has raised the question of the border again. Now, people’s responses to it depends on their political proclivities. So, if you talk to Republicans and Republicans were saying to me before the vote, if the U.K. votes to leave the European Union, that is going to raise the question of a united Ireland again. And they were telling me this, and that is exactly what happened. So, in the Stormont election that we had, basically it was over 70 percent of the MLAs, the assembly members that were returned, are people who campaigned in favour of EU membership.
Tim McInerney:
And it seems like this idea of United Ireland, certainly in the first few months after the vote was being bandied about as if this was just one simple option. When of course, it’s far from simple, right? I mean, we have, first of all, this economic barrier that the Republic has just overcome quite a severe crisis And it isn’t necessarily in a place where it can take on another million citizens. And that secondly, of course, this cultural divide hasn’t gone away, and there’s a huge population of people in Northern Ireland who would quite possibly want to take up arms again in resistance to the possibility of an all island Republic happening, right?
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. I spoke to Sophie Long, who’s an academic and who’s studied unionist and loyalist communities ad she told me that loyalist communities would not go quietly into a united Ireland. There is the potential for violence, but everybody’s hoping that it won’t come to that. I think the important thing to take away is that the question is as complex and difficult as it ever was. But Brexit has put it back on the cards. Brexit has made it this question an open question again. And people who wanted a united Ireland, they’re not even — you heard George Colgan there, they expect it to happen now. They just believe they will see it in their own lifetimes and that is something that they wouldn’t have said before Brexit.
Tim McInerney:
Well, there you go. 400 years and the history of the border continues to be written and the border continues to act, amazingly, as a kind of microcosm of European politics in general.
Naomi O’Leary:
Thanks so much for listening. You can follow us on Twitter at @PassportIrish. We have a Facebook page, The Irish passport podcast, and please do like share and subscribe to the podcast.
Tim McInerney:
Yes. And if you liked our podcast and we’d like to hear more from us, do tell your friends and family about Irish Passport so they can find out all about it themselves.
Naomi O’Leary:
So, next week we’re going to be talking about the Irish language. What is it? Where’d it come from? Where did it go? And what does it mean to Ireland today?
Tim McInerney:
I’ll be talking to Professor Lillis Ó Laoire about how some Irish language literature was banned in the mid 20th century for being, I quote, “rather two sex obsessed.”
Lillis Ó Laoire:
One priest went and had the book burned, a copy of the book burned, in front of them.
Tim McInerney:
And to Danny Doyle, a fluent Irish speaker who doesn’t come from Kerry, but from Canada to tell us about how the language has a hidden history over there.
Danny Doyle:
Canadians really are more of being French and Irish than they are French and English.
Tim McInerney:
We’ll also be looking at how the language still plays a major part in modern politics and even diplomacy.
Naomi O’Leary:
I hope you enjoyed the episode. Don’t forget, you can support us on Patreon, www.patreon.com/theirishpassport.