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South Armagh people unsure of impact on them if UK crashes out of EU
Once Brexit happens homes, like those of Pat Rice, will be divided by the border between the UK and the European Union.
Simon Carswell in south Armagh. Irish Times.Dublin. Saturday, August 31, 2019
Pat Rice’s house is divided by the Border. It is an invisible one – for now.
Straddling the geographical divide between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the retired postmaster’s house is on the front line of Brexit, literally.
His sitting room is in the North and his kitchen in the South. If you drew a line along the Border here, it would run from next to Rice’s kitchen sink through his television and out front into his driveway, splitting it in two.
“You are walking on the line here now,” he said, as he strolled out towards the main road.
From October 31st, a new border will fall across his home: the front door of the house will remain in the UK and the back door will stay in the European Union
The Border then runs out into the middle of Church Hill, the road outside the house, and up around the village of Jonesborough in south Armagh.
Rice’s address is officially in Northern Ireland. He pays his local rates in the North, but his electricity comes from the South; the meter is in his garage, in the Republic, he says.
Sheep farmer James McDonnell says a hard Brexit would be “devastating” for his business.
“It’s grand, not a bloody bit of difference,” said Rice of living right on the Border. “But there was a time when to get from here to there, legally, you had to go right around the Border posts where the custom posts was,” he added, referring to the former checkpoint a few kilometres away.
The only thing that once identified the Border on his family’s land was a “A-L” marker signifying the Armagh-Louth divide that ran through an old pig shed.
“I don’t know where that wee marker went to,” he said.
From October 31st, a new border will fall across his home: the front door of the house will remain in the UK and the back door will stay in the European Union.
“I don’t know until it happens and we’ll see,” he said when asked what might happen.
Rice and a neighbour, Michael Aiken, whose family have owned the farm across the road for decades, joke about Pat crossing a hard Border in the house between him and his wife should one emerge post-Brexit.
“What will do you about crossing the Border there?” said Aiken, laughing as the men chat at Rice’s front gate on a sunny afternoon.
“It’s crazy stuff, crazy,” said Rice.
“It is completely ridiculous,” adds Aiken.
Political developments
Two months from Brexit, the people of this Border community are increasingly nervous that the UK will crash out of the EU without a deal. They are particularly alarmed at the political developments in London this week when the new British prime minister Boris Johnson announced plans to prorogue parliament until October in a move that will reduce the time that MPs have to block a disorderly no-deal exit.
This would not just disrupt tens of million of euro of frictionless trade flowing every day across the Border, but locals here are concerned that any kind of hard Border infrastructure such as a customs or animal checks post on the M1 motorway below Jonesborough village will become a target for republicans.
“Our fear is that the minute they start to put something down, there are guys itching to take it down,” says Aiken, a nephew of the late concert promoter Jim Aiken who grew up in Jonesborough. “There are still a lot of dissatisfied guys out there who would like the disagreement.”
He says that it would not just be paramilitaries who react, but local people and businesses would move to take down any obstacles put up on the Border just like they did in the 1950s when the roads were blocked with big iron spikes.
Born two years before the Troubles began, Aiken remembers the gun battles over his family farm between the IRA, firing from behind the “March Wall” – the wall that follows the Border on the hillside a few hundred metres beyond Rice’s house – and the British army on the hill opposite Aiken’s home.
Now, apart from the odd memorial, there are few reminders of the conflict around here.
“This could be the Kerry-Limerick border – it is absolutely no different,” said Aiken.
“If they had just left things the way they were, things were fine,” said Rice.
Rice believes it “nearly impossible” for any checks to happen on the M1 below the village now, pointing to the steady flow of lorry traffic travelling at speed in both directions across the Border below.
“If you have a hold-up on the road for five minutes down there, the queue will go back about five or six miles. It just wouldn’t work. Lorries and all that and all the delays… there would be riots.”
Aiken, who lives in Rostrevor, Co Down, and runs a business in north Co Dublin, is still assessing Johnson’s latest Brexit move and what it might mean for the Border area.
“I think Boris Johnson wants no deal,” he said. He believes the Democratic Unionist Party, which is propping up Johnson’s Tory government, wants a no-deal Brexit too, regardless of the consequences for Northern Ireland.
“They will just sink their own constituents,” he said.
The idea of limiting Border checks or moving them away from the Border to depoliticize the process of protecting the EU’s single market in a no-deal Brexit would not work, locals here argue.
“It is the same thing. It is dividing the country whether the Border is there or six miles down the road,” said Aiken, pointing to the motorway.
Despite the impasse between the EU and the UK— and the criticism leveled at the Irish Government—he thinks Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tánaiste Simon Coveney have played the Brexit game well.
“The only thing they haven’t done is to prepare people for a no-deal because we all thought that there was never going to be a no-deal. But I mean ready for what? It is completely unknown,” he said.
In these parts, there is little else that people in farming and business are talking about.
A local farmer on the Border on the far side of Crossmaglen has named one of his cows NoBrexit. The cow stands in a field in Northern Ireland next to the Border, across a narrow lane from cows in the Republic.
Farmers around here worry about the practicalities of managing the movement of livestock and animal produce if there is no deal.
‘Two tarmacs’
On the other side of the motorway from Jonesborough, in Clontigora, farmer Seamus “Jazz” McDonnell points to the “two tarmacs” on the road a short walk from his farm as the only sign of the Border closest to him. There are at least eight Border crossings within a five-mile radius of his home, he says.
He recalls the Border crossing outside his house being “cratered” by the British army during the Troubles and the “banging all the time” from the nearby customs posts being blown up and other explosions. He also remembers being “afraid of your life” going out into the fields at night with a torch during “lambing” season.
McDonnell believes that if he had to pass through Border checks and pay hefty World Trade Organisations tariffs on exporting his lambs to the Republic – where 50 per cent are sold – it would wipe out his business.
“A no-deal Brexit is a disaster for everyone. My view is: leave it the way it is. If the thing’s not broke, don’t fix it,” said McDonnell, one of two local men who became the faces of the anti-Brexit campaign in this area when they dressed up as customs men at a mock Border checkpoint in early 2017.
Johnson has firmly put a no-deal Brexit on the table, says McDonnell, a member of Border Communities Against Brexit (BCAB), a lobby group campaigning to prevent this area being taken out of the EU.
In this region, support for remaining in the EU was higher than across the rest of Northern Ireland in the 2016 ballot; the vote was 63 per cent compared with 56 per cent across the North.
“He has put the country silly,” said McDonnell of the new UK prime minister.
He believes there should be another referendum because Johnson “bluffed the people” during the Brexit campaign and “brainwashed them” with false claims printed on a “big red bus” about the benefits that would flow from being out of the EU.
In a no-deal scenario, he expects a Border Poll within six months and support to turn to Irish unification in Northern Ireland, despite the willingness of the DUP to tolerate a crash-out Brexit.
“It could end up a united Ireland sooner than they think. They could be driving themselves towards it,” he said.
West of Jonesborough, another farmer and BCAB campaigner, Damian McGenity, believes the chances of a no-deal Brexit are “very high”.
“It is one of these things that is unstoppable,” he said. “I don’t see how we are going to avoid it at this particular juncture. The consequence of no-deal is going to be catastrophic.”
Johnson is “playing for time” and “running down the clock”. As for the Irish Government, McGenity’s only criticism of Varadkar and Coveney is that they have not spelled out in clear terms what a no-deal will look like.
“It is a bit like someone who is ill, who sits down with their doctor; they want to know what is the consequence of my illness. The Government owe it to the people to be frank and honest—not to scare people— but to say in practical terms what a no-deal will look like,” he said.
“If you run businesses, and run farms and cross the Border multiple times as a part of your business you need to know what the consequence will be. Today, this close to a no-deal Brexit, we don’t.”
Driving along a Border road, McGenity stops under a stone bridge near Moyry Castle, 500m [1.64 feet] from the Border. The Dublin-to-Belfast Enterprise train flies past overhead as he chats.
McGenity points out that this bridge was “blown up” many times during the Troubles.
“Who wants to go back to that? Who wants to give any of these people the justification to continue any armed activity? We have peace and we want peace to bloody well stay here,” he said.
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Tommy McKearney was honoured and delighted to have been invited by the National Graves Association to speak at the unveiling of a monument in Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin to republican stalwart Fr. Michael O’Flanagan.
Whomsoever can define the narrative of history often influences the received wisdom of the present and is thereafter in a position to set the agenda for the future. Nothing, therefore, challenges the powerful so much as those who question their interpretation of history whether it is their attempt to exaggerate the importance of some or to bury in obscurity the contribution of others.
The powerful fear nothing so much as the person of integrity who highlights their failures their follies and their crimes. That individual who exposes the flaws or wrongdoing in their decision-making, who highlights the weaknesses in their negotiating strategies or the lack of merit in their pontificating is dreaded.
It should come as no surprise therefore that the heroic role played by Father Michael O’Flanagan in the history of this country has sadly, and indeed scandalously, been overlooked and neglected for so long. Too many powerful elements on this island and abroad have had a vested interest in preserving this uncharitable silence.
Maintaining a silence about a men who encapsulated the republican virtues that epitomised the noblest aspects of Fenianism:
* Fearless in speaking against imperialism
* Staunchly supportive of Irish independence
* Believing and practising the values of secularism
* A courageous man of action who participated in activities
* Searing in analysing every situation
* Brutal honesty – even at huge person cost – in his deliberations
and
* Always on the side of the poor and oppressed whether in rural or urban Ireland or abroad.
Father Michael O’Flanagan excoriated the British Empire for its brutal treatment of the Irish people and its denial of our people’s right to self-determination and he joined the struggle to break the connection with that execrable government in London.
He rejected the Treaty that partitioned Ireland and which delivered only dominion status rendering us effectively little more than administrators of British rule in Ireland.
In the 1930s he courageously contradicted and rejected fascist propaganda claiming that the civil war in Spain was about religion … By the way have we not heard a similar claim in relation to conflict closer to home?
Religion indeed plays a crucial part in this story. As an ordained priest of the Catholic Church Fr Michael O’Flanagan broke not only with convention but his political analysis and activity posed an existential threat to the power structures in Ireland before and after the Black and Tan war.
Religion, a private matter of conscience and guaranteed by the Proclamation, has been used by the ruling class to divide the people of this land and thereby gain control over us. The concept of carefully fostered divisions was no mere rhetoric in the Proclamation. Religion was used to underscore the difference between the Empire supporting aristocracy and a restless, independence-seeking people. In the northern part of our country religion was exploited to provided the basis for dividing working-class people and allow the empire retain a foothold on its western flank.
And when in 1795, the British government funded the establishment of The Royal College of St Patrick in Maynooth, it did so not out of affection for the Roman church but to exercise influence. In return for state acceptance and support, the Catholic church in Ireland was expected to support the state, maintain the status quo and at all times condemn revolution.
Sadly and to our enormous cost this convention survived the establishment of the Free State. And only in recent years have we learned the full extent of this calamity. As the old radicals used to sing, ‘with church and state in close embrace, there must be pain for the human race’.
When Michael O’Flanagan chose to disregard this practice he was making an incalculable contribution to the welfare and well-being of Irish society. He was practicing the republican virtue of secularism, demonstrating that in Ireland it was quite possible to separate church and state and that home rule did not mean Rome rule. For a long-suffering people, yet for a people who at that time had a deep devotion, this was of enormous importance. To the powers that were in place it was equally important since it questioned their every action.
Fr O’Flanagan was no mere clerical figurehead appointed as a token gesture.
He was a gifted orator, a fact that was recognised by senior church figures when only four years after his ordination in 1904 he was sent by his bishop to the United States to engage with the Irish American Catholic community. Nevertheless, while there he displayed his deep commitment to Irish republicanism. He not only acted as an envoy for the Gaelic League, he also met and conferred with Tom Clarke and O’Donovan Rossa.
Always known as a fine speaker, his first public emergence as a political activist occurred in March 1913 when, against the wishes of his bishop, he attended and spoke at rallies in support of striking dockworkers in Sligo. This was a man who said of James Connelly – he led down his life for the Irish people to assert for them not only the right to be the political rulers of Ireland but also the economic owners of Ireland as well.
Not only was he a first class orator but he also believed in taking action in support of the less well-off and deprived. In 1915 in his parish of Cliffoney an attempt was made by local authorities to deny the poor the right to harvest turf. Defying the expressed wishes of his bishop, Michael O’Flanagan mobilised his parishioners, led them to the local bog and began harvesting turf. Thanks to this courageous piece of direct action, he forced the authorities to reverse their decision on turf cutting. He was however, unable to prevent his Bishop from censoring him and was transferred to a remote parish from where he was to have perhaps his greatest impact.
In the same year of 1915, he stood in this cemetery and delivered requiem prayers over the grave of O’Donovan Rossa before Patrick Pearse delivered his immortal oration. Nor was he afraid to directly involve himself in the fight for independence. In 1916 he helped transport arms and ammunition to his friend Patrick Moran in Crossna, the same Patrick Moran who he was to visit the evening before his execution in Mountjoy jail on 21 March 1921.
However it was in early 1917 that Fr O’Flanagan was responsible for what was perhaps one of the seminal moments in 20th-century Irish history when he effectively organised the by-election victory of Count Plunkett in North Roscommon. This result prevented Redmond’s parliamentary party from regaining its post Easter Rising momentum and facilitated the Sinn Fein general election victory of 1918.
His most heroic deeds came however when he had least political power. As a Catholic priest in early 20th-century Ireland and as a leading and influential member of Sinn Fein he could quite easily have earned immense personal privilege had he sided with the pro-treaty forces. His integrity and his analytical mind led him to take a different stance, albeit one that came at significant personal cost. Fundamentally opposed to the dominion status delivered by the treaty, he toured the United States and Australia speaking eloquently and fervently in support of the Republic.
In the face of incredible opposition and hostility from his church both in Ireland and abroad, from the pro-treaty apologists in government and in the media he persisted. He never relented in his opposition to the Treaty, unveiling a monument to Kildare’s civil war republican dead in 1933.
Always a friend of the poor, the less well-off and the working class he was quick to recognise the threat posed by fascism in the 1930s. No longer young, he worked tirelessly both at home and in the United States in support of the Spanish Republic and against the dictatorship of Franco and the Spanish Falange. It requires little imagination to envisage the hostility his principled position would have invoked in Ireland of the 1930s yet he fearlessly held his position as he had done throughout his lifetime.
And when Irish survivors of the International Brigades led by the legendary Michael O’Riordan returned to Dublin on 10th December 1938, there standing on the back of a lorry in driving rain in Abbey Street to greet them was Michael O’Flanagan, the ‘staunchest priest in Ireland’…
His life ended was to end at the relatively young age of 65 in 1942. Testimony to the regard he had earned, among the mourners was old comrade, veterans of the International Brigade and significantly in recognition of his commitment to the ordinary working class people of Ireland, stood the great Jim Larkin.
Almost 80 years have passed since he was laid to rest in this cemetery. Since his passing much has changed yet so much remains the same. Ireland is still partitioned and we might well ask ourselves what Fr. Michael O’Flanagan would make of contemporary Ireland, he who once asked in an article; ‘What will the Irish Republic do for the labourers? … What shall we eat and what shall we drink and where shall we be clothed? What would Fr O’Flanagan make of a state with 10,000 homeless and where we have food banks in almost every town?
Father Michael O’Flanagan came from the Fenian tradition and came with a clear understanding of its origins. He recognised, as did the founders of the Fenian movement that the welfare of the people would be best served in an independent and sovereign republic and that by the same token the republic must take care of all its people. He lived his life by these principles and never deviated. He has left us with a magnificent but challenging legacy. A legacy many of the powerful and comfortable would wish us to ignore and to forget.
Let us honour the life and memory of this patriot by committing ourselves to neither ignore nor forget his contribution and for what he struggled.
Let us pay him the only fitting tribute that an Irish republican patriot deserves – to pledge ourselves to build the republic he struggled so valiantly for throughout this adult life.
