Opinion

Patrick Murphy: Virus has managed to reinforce partition as north and south differ on strategy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

The tailback at the checkpoint on the border between Newry and Dundalk as the cars headed south amid new Covid-19 restrictions in the Republic. Picture via Twitter
The tailback at the checkpoint on the border between Newry and Dundalk as the cars headed south amid new Covid-19 restrictions in the Republic. Picture via Twitter The tailback at the checkpoint on the border between Newry and Dundalk as the cars headed south amid new Covid-19 restrictions in the Republic. Picture via Twitter

The coronavirus has done more to reinforce partition here in eight months than Britain has managed in a hundred years.

A slightly sweeping statement, you say, but there is little doubt that the differing anti-virus measures adopted by Belfast and Dublin have elevated the border to a new level of social and economic importance.

Because there has been no serious effort to co-ordinate both governments' policies, Ireland is now significantly divided in a wide range of activities, from the closure of schools and shops to restrictions on personal travel. (You can attend Mass in the apparently Protestant north, but not in the supposedly Catholic south.) Welcome to the re-partition of Ireland.

The divisions originated mainly because the north initially followed Boris Johnson's lax approach to tackling the virus, while the south more quickly introduced restrictive measures. The north has recently become one of the world's most rapidly infectious areas, with the number of cases doubling every 17 days, twice the southern rate.

As a side show, Irish partition has been matched by division at Stormont, where “compromise” measures were shattered when Edwin Poots claimed that nationalist areas were more infected than unionist areas. He presumably based his accusation on district council areas, which the DUP and Sinn Féin created in the north's greatest gerrymander.

These districts are so big they hide internal variations. Newry, Mourne and Down, for example, extends from Crossmaglen to Saintfield. So a high number of infections could be in North Down rather than South Armagh. (Although perhaps Mr Poots has discovered that Saintfield played a key role in the 1798 rebellion.)

In any case, evidence from both here and Britain indicates differences in infection levels can be explained by class rather than religion.

Oddly, our re-partition has been triggered not by by closing the border, but by keeping it open, largely because of the Dublin government's and northern nationalists' decision to use the border as a weapon against Brexit. If the border were closed or closely monitored for the coronavirus, the anti-Brexit argument for an open border would be undermined.

So during recent restrictions in the south, residents of Louth, for example, could not travel into an adjoining county. But residents of Armagh could travel into Louth and then go the whole way to Cork through seven other counties. It became a fundamental principle of Irish political geography that a county boundary which forms part of the border does not count as a county boundary.

Whereas a border marks a division between two administrative areas, nationalists see the Irish border more as the geographical representation of an historical wrong. Its emotional (and anti-Brexit) significance has been considered more important than its practical application in preventing or slowing the spread of the virus.

Leaving the border open makes sense only if the two administrations introduce a common all-Ireland anti-virus policy. Not only have they failed to do so, they introduced widely varying measures, thereby allowing cross-border travel to facilitate the spread of the virus.

The case for an all-island policy has not been helped by SF’s insistence that northern schools should close, but southern schools should remain open.

Its call for an all-Ireland approach unfortunately came on the same day that the party was asked by Dublin’s Standards in Public Office Commission why it had not registered a £1.5 million donation with the southern authorities. The party’s defence was that it operates “on a six and 26 county basis” and the money has been registered with the party’s northern branch. (Being against partition is a slogan, not a way of life.)

So in medical terms we have a choice between closing the border or developing an all-island approach to tackling the virus. The all-Ireland approach is the obvious (and urgent) solution. But in political terms, there will be nationalist opposition to one option and unionist opposition to the other. Which is why we will probably do neither.