by Suff » 26 Jan 2019, 19:49
I was going to reply to the OP but Mrs S came and dragged me off to go shopping.
I have crossed that border, OK I'm ex army so people walking around with guns is not a major concern for me. I crossed it in the 1980's when the situation was still hostile in the extreme. I had family in the car and had to stop and identify myself. Personally I passed my (expired and reservist), ID card over. This set the scene for that crossing. It was late, dark and, if you are taken that way, forbidding.
It was even later when we arrived and Dundalk and Mrs S, as per usual, sent me into the Bridge inn at 10:35 on that evening to see if my sister in law had arrived.
You want to talk about hostile and forbidding, you want to have been on the receiving end of the atmosphere in the bar in the Bridge Inn when I opened my mouth and spoke with my English accent, with my fairly obvious military bearing even though I was wearing a beard at the time (which probably made things worse). The whole bar stopped talking and everyone just stared at me until the "Designated" person asked what I wanted. When I told them who I was looking for and who she was, the whole bar started talking again.
People can talk as much as they want about the troubles and the British Army attitude, but I can tell you, from personal experience, that it was a two way exchange of hostilities at the level of the general public in many border places. I can assure you Mrs S was told, in no uncertain terms, that if she wanted to keep a husband she would do better by getting her lazy ass out of the car and speaking to pubs which were clearly IRA biased. Once it had been sorted I was furious with her as it was obvious that anyone in the car, but me, should have gone in, up to and including my 13 year old niece whom we were taking home.
There is no need for a hard border. There is no need to modify the GFA, there is no need to bring in the Army or have hostile border checks. There is ONE thing that will have to change, however. That is the customs checking of Irish vehicles will have to happen in the first EU port they hit, unless they use a ferry which transits directly to an EU member state.
THAT is the sticking point. That is what all this noise and fearmongering and semi lies and political posturing is all about. If the UK leaves the EU then Ireland will, by implication, be cut off from the EU and have to prove that their trade has not been mixed with UK trade when their vehicles hit the mainland EU.
It is about time that people started telling the truth about this. The trade is so small for the UK that it doesn't matter. For Ireland it is critical as the EU trade will be 48% of all trade they do.
So lets stop all the fearmongering and start telling the truth. The UK leaving the EU is going to hurt Ireland badly and they want to subvert the process in order to avoid that.
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those who understand Binary and those who do not.
It was frightening and stressful, at the very least, being questioned through the window of your car by a gun-wielding soldier, or asked to get out of your car so they could search it. I would wager that very few Brexiteers have had this experience, but of course, a lot of them don't care anyway. The past 20 years, since the GFA, you can drive seamlessly from one country to the other, the main difference being the road signs in miles rather than kilometres. We do not want a return to those awful times.
