No ‘going back to the future’ on the Border

COMMENT: Donegal Democrat columnist Pat McArt who was editor of the Derry Journal for 25 years, is more convinced now than ever that should we return to a ‘Hard Border’ due to Brexit, it will lead to utter chaos.

Speaking on RTÉ Radio on Tuesday morning last the noted Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter observed that when the Border was put in place after partition in 1921 there were only 18 ‘approved’ roads deemed legal for conducting cross border business.

Last year the Ordinance Survey Department, at the request of the government, did the most comprehensive survey ever and found there are now 208 major Border crossings running all the way from Muff in the west to Carlingford in the east.
It's also believed there could be as many as a further 80 'minor' crossings along the 310 miles of Border.
So if anyone seriously thinks we can go back to the ‘good ole days’ in a post Brexit scenario and implement a hard border without a return of serious disruption at best, or full on violence at worst, good luck with that.
John Hume used to repeat the same mantra week in week out so here’s a few facts worth repeating one more time: the demographics in the North have changed massively in that nationalists will be in a majority by, at the latest, 2021; unionists are already in a minority in both the Assembly and in Belfast City Council; and four out of the six counties already have nationalist majorities.
The DUP might suggest to the British media they speak for the people but the empirical evidence on the ground is clear - they don't!
There was a conference in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast last month where close on 2,000 ‘civic nationalists’ attended. The fact that it got so little publicity in the broadcast media should not be allowed to obscure the fact that it was the biggest political event in Northern Ireland so far this century.
Brexit, just in case anyone hasn’t noticed, has changed the political landscape totally.
In the fallout from that British vote of June 23, 2016 it doesn’t take a political Sherlock Holmes to deduce we are now in massive political churn on both sides of the border.
The British government, supposed to be ‘rigorously impartial’under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, has signed a deal with the DUP, a deal many nationalist regard as sectarian. Stormont has been in mothballs for more than two years and it doesn’t look like coming back any time soon. Relationships between Dublin and London and Dublin and Belfast are deteriorating daily and likely to get a lot worse before they get better. And unless real effort is made to get some sort of political consensus back on track we could drift back into real trouble real soon.
Believe it or not the good news is that the heavy lifting for those looking for solutions has already been done, the road map is already there. As Mark Durkan, the former SDLP leader, recently remarked: ‘the factory settings’ of the Good Friday Agreement provide the way forward.
Unfortunately, the problem has been that for the best part of 20 years the GFA has been dying of neglect. The reason is simple - unionism has, by and large, been allowed to frustrate its implementation. Take, just for example, Strand Two of the Agreement on North-South relations where there were 12 areas of co-operation suggested including agriculture, education, transport, environment, health etc. On appraisal it would seem they were talking shops, and it would be a real optimist who would suggest anything meaningful or measurable has been achieved in any of these sectors.
While the North/South council has met both at sector level and at plenary level it is now mothballed, and the North-South implementation bodies – those responsible for the items mentioned in the last paragraph – are just existing, according to a noted former Irish diplomat, Ray Bassett, on a ‘care and maintain’ basis.
The drift has to end.
Unionism is quite entitled to talk about its ‘precious union’ but, equally, nationalism has to have the right to see meaningful change.
It is not unreasonable if the Dublin government, Sinn Fein, the SDLP and others demand there has to be a new dispensation in key areas on this island in the years ahead. It makes sense.
Dublin spends more on health per capita than Germany but Irish health outcomes are much less impressive. Having two very expensive health services on an island this size is clearly not delivering economies of scale in terms of spend so why not have an integrated system, reporting to both Stormont and the Dail? [We presume it's reasonable to suggest a loyalist in Belfast would be more than happy to go to a Dublin hospital if someone told him his/her cancer treatment there would be the best available on the island of Ireland. And, obviously, vice versa.]
Unionism is nervous of change so why not have Civic Forums, reporting regularly on security, constitutional reforms/rights, health comparisons/reforms etc in key locations such as Coleraine, Derry, Newry, Ballymena, Dundalk, Sligo, Wexford etc.
Other areas to be looked at could include an All-Ireland Bill of Rights; an Economic Forum; a Flags and Emblems Act to examine inclusion of the British identity on the island of Ireland and whether that should be reflected in a new or revised Constitution; votes for Irish citizens in the North in both presidential and Seanad elections; should Ireland rejoin the Commonwealth?
A considerable amount of work has already been done to flesh out the details on these, particularly in recent times by Derry based Paul Gosling and Dublin High Court Judge, Richard Humphries. All it needs is someone to take up the baton.
Partition was a crude political solution to a constitutional and identity problem.
The price paid by all on this island in terms of unemployment, low pay, poor health outcomes, emigration not to mention political violence has been way too high. We can’t go ‘back to the future’. of customs posts, checkpoints, where the border is like the Atlantic Ocean between the two parts of the island. That day is done.

We have to go forward, not back.