How the Irish Border Keeps Derailing Brexit

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2019

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

One of the almost unsolvable problems with the U.K.’s exit from the E.U. is that it would necessitate a “hard border” between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, which would remain a member nation in Europe. The border was the epicenter of bloody conflict during the decades-long Troubles, and was essentially dismantled during the peace established by the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998. The prospect of fortifying it, with customs-and-immigration checks, has already brought threats of violence from paramilitaries such as the New I.R.A. At the same time, moving the customs border to ports along the coast of Northern Ireland—as the U.K.’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has proposed—strikes Northern Irish loyalists as a step toward unification with the Republic, which they would view as an abandonment by Britain. Patrick Radden Keefe, who wrote about the Troubles in his book “Say Nothing,” discusses the intensely fraught issues of the border with Simon Carswell, the public-affairs editor of the Irish Times. Plus, the writer Carmen Maria Machado takes us back to a farmers’ market of her childhood.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:10.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The deadline for the UK to leave the European Union has once again been pushed.
0:19.3	Prime Minister Boris Johnson failed to meet his October 31st deadline.
0:23.8	Now, if you've been following Brexit closely at all, first of all, give yourself a pat on the back because that's not easy.
0:30.6	Second, you've probably heard the term Irish backstop. That refers to the border between the Republic of Ireland and the South and Northern Ireland.
0:40.1	That border, barely 300 miles long, has become the third rail of the Brexit process, such as it is.
0:46.7	My colleague, Patrick Radin-Keefe, thankfully, has a much better grasp of the history here than I do,
0:52.8	and especially how the border has such
0:54.5	profound implications for the future of the UK and Europe as well. Patrick is the author of
1:00.3	Say Nothing, a brilliant book about the Irish troubles. When we talk about Ireland, the country of
1:06.2	Ireland today, we don't actually mean the whole island of Ireland. What that refers to is 26 counties,
1:14.1	which is most of the island, but not the six counties of Northern Ireland, which actually
1:19.3	are part of the United Kingdom. And so these are two different countries divided by a border.
1:25.4	And that border has a long and tense and tragic history.
1:32.9	Straban is a border town. The Irish Republic is 500 yards away across a river.
1:38.9	This is where the provisional IRA have their base, and this is where they retreat to
1:43.5	across a border that is notoriously
1:45.6	difficult to patrol.
1:46.8	The IRA said it was warning people to stay away from military.
1:49.9	During a three-decade conflict known as the Troubles, there was basically a war fought over
1:54.9	that border.
1:55.9	You had the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, which is a paramilitary organization, fighting to erase the border,
	...

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