Brexit: The Irish Question
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If the UK leaves the EU, what happens on the island of Ireland? Its people would be living on either side of an EU border. In this edition of Analysis, Edward Stourton explores an aspect of the Brexit debate that few elsewhere in the UK may have thought about, but which raises urgent questions. Would there be a new opportunities, with a new version of the old Anglo-Irish special relationship? Or could a divisive border and economic harm revive dangerous tensions?
Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Hugh Levinson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this podcast from the BBC. |
| 0:02.8 | This is Analysis. |
| 0:04.7 | As the debate about Britain and the EU intensifies, |
| 0:07.5 | Edward Sturton looks at it from a surprising but crucial angle. |
| 0:12.7 | If you were asked to picture the front line in the argument about Britain's EU membership, you'd |
| 0:16.8 | probably imagine bars in Westminster where politicians gossip and plot or think tanks around |
| 0:22.2 | white hall where officials are |
| 0:23.6 | perhaps war gaming the consequences of an out vote. But the Irish Times says |
| 0:28.1 | where I'm standing is and I'm quoting ground zero in the Brexit debate. |
| 0:33.0 | Doesn't look like Ground Zero of any kind, rather pleasant Georgian High Street, lots of |
| 0:38.3 | prosperous looking shops. |
| 0:39.8 | I'm in the town of Nure, just north of Northern Ireland's border with the Republic. |
| 0:46.9 | This closed in 1974 and behind us, that site behind is laid derelict until 97. |
| 0:55.0 | Here in Newry the debate is coloured by memories of the Troubles |
| 0:58.0 | and the days when the border up the road was, |
| 1:00.0 | the jargon has it a hard border. a cafe near the key side I talked to a group |
| 1:05.8 | of people who believe the interests of areas like this aren't being properly |
| 1:09.5 | reflected in the Brexit debate more generally. Connor Patterson, the Chief Executive of Murie and Morn Enterprise Agency, |
| 1:16.0 | grew up here in the north, but his mother was from the nearest town in the Irish Republic. |
| 1:21.0 | My memory of this place, my mother was from the dock, my father from Newry, so we traveled every week |
| 1:27.9 | from Newry to New York and experienced weekly what the hard border meant in practice and that was long queues not just |
| 1:35.7 | through the security border but thereafter through the customs post at |
... |
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