It is inconceivable that a vote for Brexit would not have a negative impact on the (Irish) border, bringing cost and disruption to trade and to people’s lives.
Theresa May, June 2016

The notion of a hard border is almost inconceivable.
Theresa May, July 2018

THE most striking thing about Britain’s only land border is its absence. No posts or fences mark the circuitous 310-mile boundary that stretches from littoral Derry to the Cooley peninsula’s wild hills. There is neither razor wire nor checkpoints. No customs points nor passport controls.

The Irish border was absent, too, during the European Union referendum campaign.

When John Major and Tony Blair told a public gathering in Derry a few weeks before the Brexit vote that leaving the EU could destabilise the fragile detente in Northern Ireland, the former prime ministers were widely dismissed as the latest iteration of Project Fear. Then secretary of state for Northern Ireland Theresa Villiers said that support for the peace process was “rock solid”.

After the Brexit vote, Northern Ireland’s political institutions collapsed after a decade of relative calm. Divided on the most significant issue facing Northern Ireland since the peace process began, relations between DUP first minister Arlene Foster and her then deputy, the late Martin McGuinness, quickly deteriorated.

When a botched green energy scheme run by Foster and other DUP apparatchiks was revealed to have massively overspent, Sinn Fein pulled the plug on Stormont. Few expect power-sharing to return to Belfast soon.

Belatedly, however, the Irish border has emerged as the most significant issue in the entire Brexit process.

This week we were told, once again, that the border remains the biggest stumbling block between the UK and the EU. Unless an agreement can be reached on how to avoid the need to erect infrastructure on and around the border after Britain leaves the EU, there will be no deal on Brexit.

Brexiteers have lined up to dismiss concerns about the border as a confection designed to block our departure for the sunlit uplands outside the EU’s prison walls. Bloviator-in-waiting Boris Johnson has called the issue a “gnat”, a minor irritation easily squashed out of existence.

But the border’s intractability is pretty straightforward. The invisible boundary between Ireland and the UK exists because both are members of the single market and the customs union.

If and when one side leaves the bloc, there would need to be checks in place to ensure the uniformity of standards across the border. The more Britain diverges from the EU, the greater this inspection regime would need to be.

And yet to reduce the border to a conversation about trade and technological solutions misses a far deeper truth. The absence of a border was a central plank of the political process that led to peace in Northern Ireland.

Just look at the timing. The single market was created in 1993. The following year, both loyalists and republican paramilitaries first declared the ceasefires that would lead, eventually, to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

The EU, and the open border, did not create the peace process, or the ceasefires. But both provided a backdrop within which it became much easier to envisage an end to three decades of violence that left more than 3500 dead.

With both the UK and Ireland in the same common market, the last of the customs posts that once dotted the border could be taken down. Cross-border economic activity – stymied since partition in the 1920s – finally began to increase. As violence subsided, once bombed out and barricaded off roads were re-opened.

There has been much fevered talk of a potential for violence on the border after Brexit.

Certainly, if Northern Ireland is pulled out of the single market and customs union, it is not hard to envisage dissident republicans taking pot shots at the custodians of any new border regime, even if rules and regulations are enforced away from the border itself, as some propose.

But while this focus on terrorists and violence is understandable it can feel misplaced, especially when such warnings come from anti-Brexit political figures in Britain who have shown little previous interest in Northern Irish affairs. The open border’s contribution to peace is subtler than these voices realise, but no less significant for it.

The invisible border is a testament to the core tenet of the Good Friday Agreement – that both Irish nationalists and British unionists could share Northern Ireland without compromising their political beliefs. For the former, in particular, the invisible border can elide the reality that Northern Ireland is still part of the UK.

In this interstice, something that looks and feels like normality can grow. People can easily live on one side of the border and work on the other. A Leitrim mother might bring her newborn child for check-ups in the nearest hospital, in Fermanagh. A student in Armagh crosses the border to go to college in Cavan.

With no physical border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, people can hold their political views a little less fiercely, safe in the knowledge that they are not under threat. Speaking in Oxford in September, Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney said that the invisible Irish border “allows identity to breathe more freely” than it did two decades ago.

Such sentiments have been absent from the speeches of Coveney’s British counterparts. Instead, Theresa May talks of her “precious union” while Arlene Foster proclaims her “blood-red” lines. Almost overnight the awareness of history – and of compromise – that brought an end to the Northern Irish Troubles seems in doubt.

I GREW up about 40 miles into the southern side of the border line, in a drab market town called Longford. For an over-eager child in a monochrome 1980s Irish home, Northern Ireland was strikingly exotic, simultaneously always present and continually absent.

Each night it seemed the news was filled with macabre tales from Belfast, less than a hundred miles away. But we seldom ventured north. There were checkpoints with soldiers, and tailbacks on the road. Better to stay south. To stay safe.

The partition of Ireland – and the creation of the border – was devised and implemented by the British government in December 1920. It was supposed to be a temporary measure before a full “boundary commission” that would recommend new borders for the Irish Free State and the new Northern Ireland. But, beyond some small land swaps, the border has remained the same.

By the time I went to university in Dublin, in 1998, the border had started to disappear. The customs posts had already been dismantled. The imposing watchtowers that hugged the hillsides of the southern reaches of Down and Armagh were dismantled. The squaddies went home, or eventually ended up in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Nowadays Northern Ireland is not quite at peace. Paramilitary violence is still a worryingly frequent occurrence, particularly in the working-class neighbourhoods of Belfast and Derry that provided so much Troubles cannon fodder. But the region certainly is not at war. Belfast has rebranded itself as a holiday destination. Tourists enjoy the Europa Hotel’s convenient location rather than its macabre claim to fame as the world’s most bombed hotel.

But Brexit has upset this uneasy peace. The issue of European Union has, like so much in Northern Ireland, become sectarianised. Loyalism – long the redoubt of the most extreme vision of British nationalism – is broadly united around Brexit and its dream of drawing up the drawbridge on the world.

Republicans decry Britain’s exit from the EU, the echoes of “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” ringing in their ears. (Even though, historically, Sinn Fein has been among Ireland’s most Eurosceptic parties.) Republicans have demanded a border poll, safe in the knowledge that a Tory government in London that relies on DUP support to survive would never grant one.

Arguably the most interesting development has been among Northern Ireland’s growing non-aligned voters. Senior people from Alliance – an avowedly “cross-community” party borne of a split in the Ulster Unionists in the Troubles’ early days – talk of the need to make plans for Irish unification.

Polls suggest a rise in support for unification, but huge questions remain over the prospect of a united Ireland, with the Republic’s impoverished US-style healthcare system as much of a threat as unionist opposition.

The Northern Irish electorate still largely votes along partisan lines. Last July’s general election saw only one MP returned who did not represent Sinn Fein or the DUP.

When Britain first voted on Europe, in 1975, Northern Ireland was the most Eurosceptic of the “home nations”. Where two-thirds of English backed the then European Economic Community, just 52% of Northern Irish voters supported membership.

In 2016, the positions of four decades earlier were reversed – 56% of Northern Irish citizens voted to remain part of the EU in June 2016. In the border counties, the remain vote rose to 65%.

Along the border, life goes on, in its own quiet way. After Ulster Gaelic football championship games, queues of traffic still snake out from Clones, in County Monaghan, over the border into Northern Ireland. The questions of who did what to whom during the three-decades-long dirty war remain, waiting for answers.

Peace, however, has not given way to prosperity. The border remains one of the poorest parts of the country. Where there has been sustained – and sustainable – investment in the border counties it has often come with a large sign bearing the European Union’s starry standard.

My mother’s partner, who lives in Monaghan, worries that his son’s border car dealership, so reliant on northern trade, could be badly hit by Brexit. Already the cheap price of sterling has hit business.

Brexit has already put serious strain on Ireland’s relationship with the UK. Tabloid editorials calling on Leo Varadkar to “shut his gob” only serve to inflame formerly dampened grievances. Brexiteer British commentators who claim that Brussels is cynically using Dublin ignore the overwhelming cross-party and public support for Dublin’s position.

Recent years have also changed how many of the Irish in the UK view their adopted home.

For me, and many others, the Good Friday Agreement and Ireland’s general prosperity meant we did not feel like our parents did when they came to Britain. We were equals, not second-class citizens in some people’s eyes.

Now doubts are beginning to creep in. There is talk of “the Irish” again, the untrustworthy Paddy who could do John Bull down if not kept in check.

Brexit has re-awakened the worst of colonial attitudes, particularly among the English. Whether that’s Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley, opining that “the Irish” will always find reasons to shoot each other or Andrew Bridgen declaring that he’s entitled to an Irish passport because, eh, he’s British.

Such ignorance is, mercifully, far from universal, but Theresa May and her government have been guilty of a wilful failure to understand the reality of life in Northern Ireland, and particularly the border counties. Demands from

pro-Remain politicians and civil society in Northern Ireland to listen to their concerns fall on deaf ears. The mantra remains “we are one indivisible union”.

But such bromides betray reality. Northern Ireland has long been a place apart. What about abortion and same-sex marriage?

The DUP and its supporters trumpet Brexit as a chance to re-affirm Northern Ireland’s Britishness, but it could have the very opposite effect.

The fragile political certainties upon which peace is built have been shaken. History suggests that the reverberations could have an unpredictable but profound impact.