The Border by Diarmaid Ferriter

The island of Ireland was partitioned in 1920, partly due to a combination of British duplicity, the insecurities, fears and desires of Ulster unionists and the delusions and dashed hopes of southern Irish republicans and partly because the likely alternative to a border was civil war, says Diarmaid Ferriter.

For the last twenty years, the border has been almost forgotten. The Good Friday Agreement, on April 1998, helped overcome division and sectarian hatred and bloody violence.  Before that, watchtowers loomed over border communities, military checkpoints dotted the roads, and smugglers slipped between jurisdictions. This is a past that most are happy to have left behind, but could this also be the future, asks Ferriter.

Following the fateful British vote of 23 June 2016, the Irish Border attracted a lot of attention. It became, a hundred years since the island’s partition, the single most important -and unsolvable- issue in the Brexit negotiations.

The Good Friday Agreement ‘clearly envisaged that Northern Ireland’s future constitutional arrangements would be worked out in the context of continuing partnership between North and South, and between politicians in London and Dublin. To remove Northern Ireland from Europe without its consent in not only morally wrong and politically risky; it is also a rejection of the fundamental bilaterism of the peace process,’ wrote the historian Ian Mc Bride at The Guardian on 19 July 2016. (‘After Brexit, Northern Ireland politics will again be dominated by the border.’) Basically, any sort of border in Ireland, whether physical or regulatory, is politically impossible.

The way one historian of the border, Peter Leary, saw it in March 2018, there were ‘broadly, three ways to avoid the return of customs checks and stations to the long-troubled Irish border’: a united Ireland, a special arrangement for Northern Ireland, or a settlement covering the whole United Kingdom. But none of these options  were open to Theresa May and neither will be to her successor. (‘There are three ways out of the Irish border impasse,’ The Guardian, 1 March 2018)

What Brexit and the negotiations during the past three years also revealed was the depth of ignorance of pro-Brexit conservative politicians about Ireland and the Irish border, none more so than Boris Johnson, foreign secretary from July 2016 to July 2018 and a front-runner in the Tory leadership race, who embarrassingly suggested the invisible boundary between the London Boroughs of Camden and Westminster as a possible model for a post-Brexit border. (BBC, 27 February 2018)

In The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics, Diarmaid Ferriter describes a century of negotiations and conflicts between the Irish revolutionary government and the British Crown; the creation of the border and the political implications that followed its creation. The Troubles and how the subsequent opening of the border as part of the Good Friday Agreement brought peace and solidarity on both sides of the Irish Sea. The Border is also a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary politics, especially in London, and the implications of Brexit on the Irish border. The whole book, but especially the last chapter, Brexit, Backstops and Brinkmanship, is a must-read to all those who are concerned about the future of the United Kingdom after Brexit.