Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Cross-border crime already unites us

Police on both sides of the border are tackling drug-linked criminality
Police on both sides of the border are tackling drug-linked criminality Police on both sides of the border are tackling drug-linked criminality

Borders stir passion and keep it on the boil all over the world.

The best to be said of the Irish border is the droll Twitter incarnation that came into being to remind everyone that it is only a factory of grievance on one level, that first and always it is where real people live their daily lives.

Yet another poll dropped into the ether, though, just as a rattle of crime reminded anyone who deliberately forgets that drugs mean misery and violence on both sides of the border. On at least initial appearances drugs look to be part of recent bloodshed, crime. All-island, all-Ireland crime, cross-border crime.

The Irish Times delivered analysis of new polling in its weekend edition, flagging it up online beside an article on drugs on the street in Dublin city centre. There were anguished and very vivid words from small businesses on the Liffey along Aston Quay, next to O’Connell Bridge. Concentration of dealing another sad consequence of Covid lockdowns and also a Dublin borderland issue, it was said, since the river divides north city from south city.

The sad truth is that drug dealing is Dublin-wide, charted in repeated RTE Primetime exposures, visible as in Belfast to even an untutored eye in many places. Heroin and other drugs are the stuff of woeful addiction with all its consequences for individuals and helpless families. The stuff also of spreading crime, with increasingly frequent outbursts of bloody gang warfare up, down and across the island.

Instead of facing up to drug abuse, how to tackle addiction, talking about public health policy and the arguments everywhere on decriminalising drugs, some find it easier to focus on the now hackneyed arguments about a possible border poll. When to hold it/them, since there would have to be simultaneous polling north and south. How to prepare the ground, how both governments should be involved. Always likely to be contentious when you think about it, since north and south a quantity of Irish politics has always depended on either behaving as if the border didn’t exist. Or that it had come into being like global warming; gradually, mysteriously. Or deniably, if you happen to be a deep-dyed curmudgeon/crank/partisan.

There came some time ago lots of pan-unionist heat. There is allegedly increased ‘polarisation’, though polarisation created northern politics. It became contentious to discuss the holding of a poll.

Criteria for the holding thereof? Authority of criteria-setter? Refusal to spell out stuff raises hackles. Though it should be said that some hackles, possibly descended from Croppies, never quite lie down. Ireland’s Future (How dare they? Who are they? Who aren’t they?) hold serious conferences interspersed by the odd scold. Now polls about polling are contentious. And what of the pollsters?

By the time readers see this they – note the non-specific gender – will have heard or seen the findings plus analyses. Seems to me less than striking overall, with at least some initial interest misplaced. ‘Big majority in North against united Ireland’, an Irish Times front page highlighted, whereas two paragraphs down the paper reported a simultaneous poll in the Republic found ‘more than four to one in favour of unity.’ It also noted that voters in the Republic favour a poll in the next five years, where a northern majority wants to wait for ten. I would have guessed at a different set of current priorities in the Republic.

But here’s the thing, or a thing. Alan Dukes caught attention with a careless and colourful characterisation of ‘border’ communities which distracted from the probable intent of a serious documentary.

We’re already united. Across the border and well beyond the borderlands of Monaghan, Cavan, Armagh, Donegal and Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone, unity exists. It isn’t what unionists fear, nor is it sunny uplands. It’s blasts from guns, it’s angry, vengeful gangsters with – sometimes - cross-community paramilitary links, profiting from the destruction by drugs of lives and bodies and hope.