A VETERAN photographer who took pictures of the last customs posts on the border says it would be "incredible" if checks on goods were re-introduced in the aftermath of Brexit.
Fermanagh-born Bobbie Hanvey travelled to Killeen near Newry in December 1992 to record the last days of the customs stops before he and many others believed they were to disappear forever.
The frontier posts ceased operation the following January with the introduction of the single market, which signalled the free movement of goods between EU member states.
However, with the UK's planned departure from the EU, many fear the return of a hard border with the reintroduction of checks similar to those which operated up until the early 1990s.
Based for the past 50 years in Downpatrick, Co Down, former psychiatric nurse Bobbie (73) tells how he developed a "love of customs posts" from an early age when his family would travel every Saturday from their home in Brookeborough across the border to Clones in Co Monaghan.
"My mother would smuggle butter back across the border by concealing it in her underwear," he recalls.
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"There was no way a customs man – and they were all men back then – was going to search a woman's underwear."
There were other ways of ensuring a frictionless border too, he says.
"Everybody who crossed the border regularly would identify their favourite customs man and my da, Johnny, was no different," says Bobbie.
"My da would slip his favourite customs man a baby Powers' (a small bottle of whiskey) who'd then obligingly wave him through with a friendly 'Carry on Johnny'."
More than quarter of century on from when the customs posts were decommissioned, Bobbie is bizarrely excited about their potential return.
"I thought I'd seen the back of them for good," he says.
"It really would be incredible if they came back though I reckon there'd be plenty who'd be none too pleased – apart from the smugglers of course."
Along with more than 85,000 Bobbie Hanvey negatives, the customs post pictures now reside in the archive at Boston College in Massachusetts.
