Laying it on the Line

The Border and Brexit

Jude Collins

• Publisher: Mercier Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781781177457
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Government & Business
• Index: Business

A collection of interviews with diverse stakeholders, Laying it on the Line: Opinions on the Border gives voice to a wide range of views on the line across Ireland that everyone forgot. Established a century ago, it has re-emerged as central to relations, turning into not just the border between the Republic of Ireland and the UK, but between the EU and the UK.

In this book we hear from those living in border communities, where social and economic life has flourished since the Good Friday Agreement. With Brexit, their lives and livelihoods risk serious damage.

Interviewees include former Taoiseach John Bruton, historian Diarmuid Ferriter, MEP Martina Anderson, Derry footballer and barrister Joe Brolly, former RUC officers and British soldiers, and a wide range of other politicians, journalists, experts and people affected in Northern Ireland. Economically and politically, we are entering uncharted waters where dangerous winds blow.

1

MARTINA ANDERSON

8 February 2019

Martina Anderson was born in the Bogside area of Derry in the 1960s and grew up amid the civil rights campaign and the unfolding political situation that led to conflict. She was active in republicanism from the late 1970s and spent over thirteen years in prison, mostly in English jails, for republican activities. She was released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and went on to serve as a Sinn Féin MLA and a Stormont minister. She is currently an MEP.

I recall one time my father got a new car – new to us, that is – and my mummy took my younger sister Sharon and me out of school early, and we got into the car and went across the border to Buncrana. It was like a big adventure – I was around six or seven. At the border we were just curious – why were they stopping the car? There was talk of smuggling butter and bread – it was something we always did. And for us as children, there was a certain nervousness, because Mammy and Daddy were doing something bold and they might get caught with their sugar or butter or whatever! And later, as I was growing up, there was the story of this girl who had her wedding dress confiscated at the border. So not everybody got waved through even then.

This maybe sounds contradictory to everything I now know and believe, but we had a sense that when we crossed, we were in Ireland. We had no relationship with the state in the North, so it did feel when we crossed the border as if we were going into another country. There was a sense of belonging. Comparing Portrush in the North to Lisfannon or Buncrana, there was something bright and Irish about Lisfannon and Buncrana.

Then I remember people talking about the military instal­lations going up at the border. I came from a particular family, a particular area, a particular community, which meant that, before my arrest at sixteen, I had been pulled out of the car at the border hundreds of times. The car was stopped and searched, you were taken into a hut, you’d see people you knew at the side of the road. After militarisation of the border, I don’t remember ever crossing without there being that sense of aggression. So from crossing to something bright and beautiful, it was now more that you felt a sense of relief when you had crossed the border. On the Donegal side, there were no British soldiers on the streets, there were no Saracens, there were no helicopters.

Our day-to-day living in the North and the South was markedly different. When they divided our country and crea­ted partition, they didn’t just divide the country’s landscape. It was deliberate that they had two health systems, two education systems, two agriculture systems, two of everything, in all cases markedly distinct.

I think the people in the twenty-six counties, for all its faults, had a connection with the establishment of that state and with those who were in government, despite the damage done by the Civil War and all of that. Growing up here in the North, our community never felt any kind of connection with the various branches of the state. For people in Donegal, like them or loathe them, the police came from the community. They were John and Jane who lived round the corner. Somebody would have known the guard, someone knew the civil servant, somebody knew the judges and solicitors and all that. We didn’t.

The border is invisible because Europe made it clear that funding through Interreg [a series of programmes to stimulate cooperation between regions of the EU] was not for back-to-back projects, it was for projects that had to be truly integrational, across the border. Today we have somewhere in the region of 170 areas of all-Ireland cooperation.

In the withdrawal agreement there was this ‘backstop’. It was there to prevent physical infrastructure on the border in Ireland ever emerging again. We had to ensure that Europe understood the three strands of the GFA. The fact was, neither the European Council nor the MEPs understood the GFA and all of its parts. But we finally got them to understand that if you’re going to have an all-Ireland economy, you cannot have a regulatory system that is different in the North and the South.

I think the EU would have tolerated the hardening of the border in Ireland if they hadn’t understood the conflict, the peace process, the political process. It has taken a lot of hard work to get the EU to understand the damage that would be done if the GFA were torn apart – which is what Britain is doing.

No one talked about Ireland before the referendum. Every­one was talking about Scotland. But now they are realising that Ireland is the only successful peace process that Europe has. Europe needs that to be able to help war-torn places. They cannot protect the GFA in all of its parts and operate the all-Ireland economy while saying, ‘We will put in an EU border.’

[In March 2017 Martina Anderson made an angry speech in the European Parliament telling colleagues, ‘Ireland is told “Get over it – it’s going to be a frictionless border” – whatever the hell that means. Let me put the record straight to everyone here: no border, hard or soft, will be accepted by the people of Ireland. What British armoured cars and tanks and guns couldn’t do in Ireland, twenty-seven member states will not be able to do. So, Theresa – your notion of a border, hard or soft – stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, because you’re not putting it in Ireland.’ 1]

I was quite disturbed going back to Brussels, having heard people tell me that Brexit is already here, in our purses, in our wallets, the bottom’s falling out of the pound. So to tell you the truth, it was just exasperation with all of it that led me to let rip. I hadn’t actually expected it to go viral, but for forty-eight hours, I couldn’t cope with the demand across Europe. We got international attention in a way we hadn’t before. Italy, France, Greece, TV, radio – I couldn’t cope with the demand. But nobody said anything about my having been bold in the chamber. They were all starting to get an understanding of partition, of the border, why we needed to be in the customs union and the single market to preserve the GFA.

I think the backstop debate has accelerated a conversation we’ve been having for years. I’ve wanted to see this country reunited since I was able to understand the damage partition was doing. In Europe I was on the Brexit Steering Group and I urged protection of the GFA in all of its parts. And in the Council meeting on 29 April 2017, the Council sent its first signal: in the event of reunification, the North will still continue to be a member of the EU.

There are a growing number of people who like what they see in metropolitan Dublin, for all of its faults. If they had a choice of which union they wanted to be a part of, the union with the EU with all its deficiencies or the union with a UK which is breaking up, it would be an easy choice. Some are coming to realise what we have known all our lives: that the British establishment doesn’t care about them. There are people in the Pro­testant/unionist community who are progressive, who don’t want their children or their grandchildren to be living in a backward place. They want guarantees, and rightly so, that their identity and their culture will be protected. It’s very important to plan and prepare. I don’t want the North just bolted onto the South.

There’s a role for Europe to be able to say, ‘What will that mean, compared to if you’re not in?’ And I think we need a white paper from the Irish government. This is not a Sinn Féin-driven process. Progressive nationalists are turning their backs on Westminster and even Stormont – although I think we need a place where we can go during transition.

I think the economic argument for unification was won a long time ago. Farmers have for some time been operating on an all-Ireland basis. There is £1.2 billion of trade every week across this island. There are 200,000 jobs dependent on it. Every day, 32,000 people cross the border.

The backstop is not enough. The backstop is not going to uphold our rights. The Irish government, at the stroke of a pen, could provide people here in the North who are Irish citizens with the opportunity to vote in European elections [the EU has re-allocated the exiting UK’s European Parliament seats, giving two of these to the Republic of Ireland]. There are twenty-two member states out of twenty-eight who afford their nationals the opportunity to vote. The Irish government can give us those two extra MEP seats. Do I think they will? Absolutely not. When the Taoiseach said, ‘No Irish government will ever again leave you behind’, we welcomed the warm words and it was great that an Irish Taoiseach [prime minister] realised that we had been left behind.2 But I was with the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin last week, and I told them, ‘You have an opportunity to send a signal to the people of the North that you will stand over what you said.’

The first right to go and the only right to go during the transition period is your democratic right to vote in a European election. That’s forty years after our campaign for ‘One “man”, one vote.’

But it’s not just having MEPs. The rights that are going to be stripped away as a consequence of Brexit affect us all. An example: part-time workers got their right to holiday pay only because speech and language therapists took Britain to the European Commission and the Commission acted. So part-time workers in the Protestant/unionist community are having their rights upheld only because of Europe. The British government wouldn’t have facilitated that. So representation is one aspect of it, and we find it precious because we had to fight for that right. But people who are British are entitled to the same rights as all of us.

Mary Lou McDonald, the president of Sinn Féin, was invited into a conversation in Derry, and the loyalist bands were part of that. Jeffrey Donaldson of the DUP was on the podium with a few others. Jeffrey said, ‘You know, nobody is talking about Irish unity. When I talk to people, they’re talking about the Assembly up and running.’ And this guy stood up and said, ‘Jeffrey, we in the loyalist bands are talking about it. And Mary Lou – I want to know, how are you going to protect our rights?’ I didn’t think I would have heard that – a challenge to Jeffrey Donaldson about the need for rights to be protected.

The plates have shifted, and people want to know if their rights will be protected. People want to be able to make an informed decision.

It’s not going to work unless all sides are happy. I’m not saying every person, but we all have to try to arrive at an accommodation. I don’t think it’ll be just the economics – it’ll be social, it’ll be political. Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

2

AODHÁN CONNOLLY

11 February 2019

Aodhán Connolly is the director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, a leading trade body for retail in Northern Ireland covering everything from the smallest bookshops to the largest multi-nationals. He has worked in the political process for over twenty years and lobbied on issues such as young people not in employment, education or training, the environment, trade regulation, commercial rates and public health.

I was brought up in Annakera, a wee place outside Portadown, thirty miles from the border. When we went over the border we knew we were going on our holidays, and the stress on my dad lifted. But on the way home, it always came back. You’d often be taken out of the car and searched – not always, but it did happen. This was particularly the case when we were five or six – the time of the hunger strikes. [Betwee...