The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic on Killeen School Road in Killeen, Co Armagh. File photo by Oliver Dixon, Wikicommons
AS a young reporter in the mid-1970s, I interviewed a retired GP, Dr Francis Darcy, about his life serving the medical needs of a rural border community. Although long retired, he vividly recalled the 1920s and how Partition had badly hit his practice with a new border, splitting it in two.
His Roslea patients in Co Fermanagh were in the new Northern Ireland but the people he had cared for in Co Monaghan were now in the new Free State.
Aside from new allegiances to Belfast or Dublin there were numerous practical issues. In one house, the fault line meant people slept in their bedroom in the south and lived by day in rooms in the north.
For over a hundred years, the location of the border proved problematic. It still is, with suggestions that the resolution to the Irish Sea Border would be to re-establish a land border where it always has remained, albeit effectively invisible since the end of the Troubles removed all the military hardware and security posts that had blighted the area.
Considering all the demographic changes in the western counties of Northern Ireland, it seems remarkable that various attempts at addressing the anomalies and tensions caused by a border, meant in 1921 to be a temporary solution, came to nothing.
I didn’t know it at the time of my interview with Dr Darcy, but the Dublin Government wrote a secret paper in 1976 aimed at redrawing the border - including changes which would have re-united the area his practice had served. State papers released in the Republic over the new year revealed that a plan was discussed to integrate large areas of Northern Ireland into the Republic.
One scenario would have meant almost 500,000 residents of Northern Ireland being transferred to the Republic without even moving house. Two-thirds of the land mass in the west, including Derry city, parts of counties Derry, Tyrone, south Down, and south Armagh, would have changed jurisidiction, along with all of Co Fermanagh.
It wasn’t the first time my native Fermanagh was the subject of debate as to its placement on either side of the border.
In 1921, the “Ulsterisation” of resolving British-Irish negotiations saw consideration given to all of the province forming the new Northern Ireland. But, put bluntly, there were too many Catholics in Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan for a comfortable unionist majority.
At one stage, it was thought the new Northern Ireland would also sacrifice Fermanagh and Tyrone but it was considered that a four-county state would be too small to survive.
As a result of setting up a six county state, the line on the map was drawn along old county boundaries. It was estimated that a third of people found themselves on the “wrong side” of the border, with many Protestants in the southern counties moving north and northern Catholics feeling alienated in the Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland.
The Boundary Commission, set up in the 1920s, was supposed to resolve some of the anomalies by redrawing the border. But by the time it had finished, the Commission’s report was suppressed and details were only released in the 1960s.
And the 1970s proposal of repatriation was similarly doomed to failure.
As the seventies wore on, the conflict along the border saw it hardened as a military zone with checkpoints and roads being bombed and cratered by the British security forces to deter attacks from southern bases.
Denzil McDaniel
Partition was ingrained as never before and the separation increased the lack of understanding between northern and southern society in general.
Cross-border traffic throughout the conflict reduced considerably. But after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, with both jurisdictions in the European Union, links burgeoned across the divide. To all intents and purposes, the border became invisible, with cross-border working, business, sport, social activity greater now than at any time.
Brexit shattered this; and the advent of an Irish Sea border has focused on the geographical location of the land border again. At a meeting I attended a couple of years ago, the anger of loyalism over the Northern Ireland Protocol was palpable with one suggesting: “Maybe it’s time we redrew the border at Portadown.”
But in many areas along the border, memories of the practical difficulties and, indeed, notwithstanding the emotions of identity, would make people baulk at the notion of a border becoming a barrier again.
Denzil McDaniel is a former editor of The Impartial Reporter @DenzilMcDaniel