Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Border areas long familiar with flouting customs rules

A march organised by Border Communities Against Brexit at Stormont last year. The group has warned that a hard border looks increasingly likely
A march organised by Border Communities Against Brexit at Stormont last year. The group has warned that a hard border looks increasingly likely A march organised by Border Communities Against Brexit at Stormont last year. The group has warned that a hard border looks increasingly likely

Brussels, London and Dublin can decide what they like about the post-Brexit border but people who live along it will go their own sweet way.

Smuggling, large-scale and miniature, has a lively pedigree along that intricately squiggly line, and respect for the law with regard to proper payment of duty is not automatically on the cards.

There is of course nothing humorous about the Republic losing around 300 million euros a year because of fuel smuggling.

But there were few votes for Brexit along the northern side of the border, and it would be a sad reverse if Brexit stratagems should daunt the wily and adaptable people of Monaghan, Louth, Cavan, south Armagh and south Down, Donegal and Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh, who live the daily reality of a line on the map.

Leo Varadkar, to hoots and scolding from unionists, says it’s up to the British government to be imaginative about the method of trade control. Not for the first time, British and unionist reverence for what some like to call ‘the frontier’ seems likely to have an equal and opposite effect.

Imagination at grassroots level there will be, and with little or no communal disapproval. Major criminality is one thing. Everyday minor sabotage of the rules is familiar to everyone who has ever lived along the squiggly line.

Seeing otherwise squeaky-clean parents routinely deceiving Her Majesty’s Customs lasted less than a decade in my case, but the memory lingers. It caused no scars. We lived in a small bulge of Armagh across the line, a mile from the border in two directions, Louth ‘up’ the road, Monaghan the other way.

It was a more or less direct run of 10 -12 miles to Dundalk on our ‘unapproved’ road compared to twice the distance on the official route that took you through ‘the Customs.’

But as ‘the Master’ in a primary school our respectable da wouldn’t risk the unapproved dash. So mother’s supplies of southern-packaged ‘Sweet Afton’ cigarettes came clandestinely through the customs, swaddled in the (clean) nappies stashed under the dashboard for emergency changes.

Though the parents became hushed and tense as we were waved down for the ritual ‘anything to declare’, theirs, ours, was pitiful smuggling compared to the activities of our neighbour.

A smile from under a peaked cap into the car crowded with small faces, while the Master said his firm ‘We have not’, and we were through. End of drama.

Whereas the three of us older than six by the time we left the borderlands heard pigs squealing by night and clocked with fascination across our bedroom ceiling the headlights of lorries from the lane on the other side of the road. Regularly, once or twice a week?

Michael Harding wrote with his magical realist eloquence last January in an Irish Times column of pigs ‘that came along the river in boats from Lisnaskea to Belturbet, their bellies full of stout to keep them quiet, although their snores occasionally betrayed their presence to policemen with good ears.’

These were wide-awake porkers leaving the farm near the schoolhouse.

Our timid, blow-in parents claimed the farmer, imposing, red-haired, husky-voiced, original pusher to our mother of Sweet Afton fished out of a roomy bosom, was known as the Queen of the Smugglers.

A fat lot they knew. In the early evenings in the deserted schoolyard we played Smugglers and Customs with the Queen’s oldest children.

You be the smugglers, urged our diplomatic mother, let them be the customs. Locals would never have said that. Smuggling held no shame.

Ah but depriving the state of revenue, deliberately presenting officers of the law – though the customs had scant status – with a lie by omission, what example was that to give children? We never asked, and the parents are long-gone.

There no doubt was serious racketeering in the exercise of notching up payments from authority north and south by sending the same livestock back and forth.

That was a later development, when border activity had sinister, often deathly significance. But when the first soldiers of the Troubles were stationed in Crossmaglen there was as much dismay at what it would do to the smuggling as outrage at the attempt to make the Queen’s writ visible in the republic of south Armagh.

Beautiful, haunted districts long-neglected by Dublin and Belfast are trying now to lure tourists and build legitimate enterprises. Metropolitan concerns are not a priority where one state meets another in the same divided country.

Along the Border, Brexit is just another challenge.