The hardest border

The village of Muff lies close to the border between Donegal and County Londonderry.

During the Troubles, cars queued at the Army checkpoint, where twitchy young soldiers with rifles rattled out the usual questions. Where are you coming from? Where are you going to? Get out and open your boot, sir.

Then it was on down a twist in the road and the Irish customs men were on their marks waiting to catch the locals with the contraband.

Now, you’d hardly know you were crossing.

A black corrugated hut at the old customs post is boarded up - weeds sprout from the chimney.

Over the bridge and you’re into the one-street village. It is tiny but boasts four petrol stations.

There is what used to be an old Irish ballroom - a big, squat building called Borderland. When Derry city burned in riots and bombings, Borderland was the escape – the dance hall down the road, where you jived your way into another world.

Marie Lindsay was born in Muff, but the city of Derry is centre stage in her heart. She lives in the hills just outside the village and has a foot in both camps.

Each morning she gets into her car in Donegal, in the Republic, and drives up through a little wood. Then it’s on through a housing estate and into Derry, where she’s principal of a girls' school, St Mary’s College.

She has lived her life along this border. Like thousands of others, she feels she has a double identity.

“I’m Donegal, born and bred. Donegal is in my DNA, but Derry is my home city, I feel I belong there,” she says.

Her journey to work is seamless these days – down what was once an “unapproved” road - spiked, so that people could not drive across.

As the Troubles in Northern Ireland escalated in the 1970s, the Army and police blocked and cratered the smaller roads to make all but the approved checkpoint routes impassable, and to stop paramilitaries crossing.

Lindsay has known a hard border - the interminable waits at checkpoints. They were dark days that no-one really wants to recall.

She has now grown used to peace and the ease of life.

On the evening drive home from work, she points out the spot where you have crossed.

“The road signs switch from miles to kilometres, the road markings change, but that’s it,” she says.

She carries two purses – a sterling purse for the north and a euro purse for the south. But both sides take each other’s currency at a decent rate. Many people carry two mobile phones – one north, one south.

Talk to any of the girls in St Mary’s, says Lindsay, and you’ll soon find they have roots in Donegal – a granny in Malin, an aunty from Carndonagh.

All down the years, city dwellers have taken a Sunday drive from Northern Ireland over the border to feast their eyes on the beauty of Five Fingers Strand, to nurse a pint in Buncrana, to treat the children to a ride on the swing boats by the shore.

Betty Holmes is a member of Donegal Action for Cancer Care. The group is based in the Republic of Ireland but campaigns to access nearby health facilities in Northern Ireland.

She is passionate about getting the best cancer care close at hand.

It’s a deeply personal campaign. Her father died of lung cancer a week after her seventh birthday - he had never smoked. Her mother died from breast cancer three years later.

When a new state-of-the-art radiotherapy centre opened recently in Altnagelvin Hospital, Derry, there was a sigh of relief from families on both sides of the border.

No more two-hour treks over the mountain pass from Derry to Belfast for those living with cancer in Northern Ireland’s western region.

No more five-hour treks from Donegal to Galway for cancer patients living in the Republic of Ireland.

“It is a good 308km to Galway and what sort of a journey is that when there is radiotherapy sitting a few miles across the border?” asks Holmes.

The journey to Altnagelvin Hospital is as little as 45 minutes from the top end of Donegal at Malin Head, she says.

The Irish government has invested in the new services in Northern Ireland.

Agreements in place between the UK and Irish governments mean there are currently places for 385 cancer patients coming across the border.

But Brexit weighs heavily on Betty Holmes’s mind.

“Our concern is what happens in three to five years when the real effect of Brexit is starting to be felt,” she says.

“Will the Irish government be in a position to pay what [is set] down as the cost of treating a cancer patient at Altnagelvin? Will that number be reduced from 385 to 200 initially and will it go down from there?”

The sharing of medical services across the border is not a one-way street.

“If you are the parent of one of the children from Northern Ireland who would travel to Dublin for paediatric cardiac care, then you might be asking what impact Brexit could have for those children?”

Ciaran Crilly woke up to the news of Brexit last June and immediately worried about his business.

Just up from Cloughoge church on the Newry border, where the Army posts once cast long shadows on the high hill, is the sweet factory – a family business set up in the 1970s.

Ten years before that Ciaran Crilly’s father, Peter, left for a sugary fact-finding mission, taking in the Mars factory in Slough, and then Blackpool to uncover the secret of getting the name through the stick of rock.

In the 1970s, as the Troubles raged in Northern Ireland, he came home, put his head down and set up a business. Now his son has the reins.

Before Spanish holidays were the norm, the Crillys made seaside rock, selling it from Portrush in Northern Ireland to Bundoran and Bray in the Republic.

This was the time when traditional sweets - bags of clove rock, bull’s eyes and brandy balls - still cast their spell.

On both sides of the border, they still love their sweets.

But Brexit was a blow.

“It was terrible. Our business has been going superbly this last 10 years, year-on-year growth, no issues. Then you have this shock and you ask why did it need to happen?”

Drive on for an hour along the border and it’s sheep day at Enniskillen mart.

The yard is a long line of muddy Land Rovers hauling trailers full of sheep and ewes.

Men in flat caps, jeans and wellington boots meander about.

Denzil Brady is 84 but wiry and keen-eyed. In all his years working on his father's farm in the hills around Enniskillen, he has had little time for the European Union.

“They're the greatest set of rogues in Brussels,” he says.

“They have farms nearly out of business with the whole pile of paperwork.

“With all those regulations, I fear for the young farmers in their 40s and how they'll suffer lives of misery.”

Hugh Maguire has a different view. He has farmed for more than 50 years up by the famous Marble Arch Caves. His land straddles the border and he's had his share of headaches.

He has cows and sheep, but some of them belong to the north and some belong to the Republic. It makes for two sets of paperwork and a few headaches.

Woe betide the Irish sheep that sets a hoof over the border and vice versa.

But Maguire believes the EU did a lot of good and Brexit is not welcome.

He remembers the old days of smuggling across the border. He remembers the hard border, the checkpoints and queues and he just asks himself what lies ahead now.

It could be a big step backwards, he says.

“Farmers cannot farm without the European single farm payment,” he says. This is the agricultural subsidy payment, based on the area of a farmer's land, to offset the cost of producing food.

People who own petrol stations along the border know all about boom and bust - trade depends on currency fluctuations and significantly lower fuel duty rates in the Republic of Ireland.

Enda McColgan, manager of the Texaco in Muff, says 90% of the garage’s customers come from Northern Ireland to top up.

Business is booming. There was one stage when demand was so great they even had to employ somebody to manage the traffic on the road outside.

Garage owner Colm McKenna remembers bombings, the checkpoints and the days of soldiers in ditches.

“If we had a hard border then we’d be going back 30 years in six weeks to six months,” he says.

It’s not hard to imagine who might target such a border, he points out. Some have warned that a hard border could be used as a justification for violence by dissident republicans who do not support the current peace agreements in Northern Ireland.

Not far away, at another crossing, Kevin Melarkey is the egg man on the border at Bridgend near Derry.

He's there at the farm shop seven days a week - in a small hut - selling eggs and bags of spuds. He has a good thick coat and a pair of mountain boots to keep out the cold.

When he gets a minute, he can stand outside his hut and rest his eyes on the blue hills of Donegal.

He's too young to remember much more than the queues at the checkpoints on a Sunday when half of the city decamped across the border to Buncrana or to buy cheap petrol.

Like everyone else, he does not know what Brexit will bring.

“We're in limbo, it's just a waiting game,” he sighs.

Brexit and border changes will be more significant for Northern Ireland, says Katie Daughen, head of Brexit Research and Support Services to the British/Irish Chamber of Commerce. Every year 31% of NI exports are to the Republic and 27% of its imports come from there.

The main sector to be affected is food and agriculture. “It’s worth over £4.5bn to the economy in the north and it’s by far the most exposed.”

Daughen lists a couple of examples of the all-island nature of the economy:

• Wheat grown in the south is processed in north
• 40% of chicken produced in the south is processed in the north

One of Ireland’s most famous exports faces similar problems.

Guinness is brewed in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. But it’s sent north of the border to be bottled or canned before returning to Dublin for export to the world.

But it is not all doom and gloom. There are opportunities out there too.

The border’s disappearance was a gradual shift - like ice melting.

After the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, things moved slowly.

But the dragon’s teeth - ugly concrete blocks squatting on hundreds of country roads linking north and south - were suddenly yanked. The soldiers in their camouflage passed out of view.

In 2003, they took away the checkpoint at Newry. They pulled down the ugly iron cage, the military turret high on the hill above the church at Cloughoge.

The people who felt safer for the presence of the Army on the hilltop called it a watchtower.

Those who resented the Army, and their high power cameras, preferred “spy post”.

It was close to that Newry border where Lord Justice Gibson and his wife Cecily were killed by an IRA bomb in 1987.

A year later, Robin and Maureen Hanna and their son, David, six, died in an IRA explosion after crossing the border.

The family from Hillsborough in the north were returning from holiday when their vehicle was mistaken for one belonging to a senior judge.

The big military turret went up on the hill after that. It was a stretch of road that became a no-man’s land between north and south.

It was not a place for a friendly chat - there was tension in the air, the soldiers were edgy.

Crossings were never easy.

Many resented the waiting and the questioning. People were afraid they might get caught up, a sitting target for a bomber. Or scared that a soldier might even get trigger happy.

But there was another side to the old border too.

The game of “catch me if you can” with the customs officers still raises a smile.

Butter was cheaper on one side – hide it in the pram and sit the child on top. It was all the sweeter for being illicit.

Young couples from the north took the train to Dublin to buy the wedding ring. There are tales of dangling the ring out of the train window on a thread on the way home to evade the keen eye of the customs man.

Smuggling was rife.

Johnston tells a story about the undertaker in Blacklion in the Republic who was running short on shrouds, but had a friend across the border in Belcoo who knew another man that could get him some.

The problem was getting them over the bridge from north to south.

“Yer man came into the bar in Blacklion and said the parcel had arrived and he had it with him,” Johnston says.

“So he went into the kitchen and he had on a coat three times too big and he opened it and he had put all the shrouds on himself and walked over the border like that.

“As he took the shrouds off in the kitchen at the back, yer man looked at him and said: ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a man taking a shroud off’.”