The dangerous myth of the ‘bad border’ in Northern Ireland 

The Irish border is awash with journalists and pundits from Great Britain, scratching their heads in wet frontier fields patrolled by incurious Friesians. No border bridge has been left unmolested by visiting television crews in search of a sombre framing shot. The former ‘Killing Fields’ outside Enniskillen were my home until I left for university in England at 18. I don’t decry the honest attempts of blow-in journalists to explain the conundrum of what Churchill wearily dismissed as the ‘dull and dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ – it’s a bit of a head melter all right. But the blaring singularity of the ‘bad border’ narrative we hear far too much of is both ignorant and dangerous.

The Brexit border discourse in Great Britain, with few exceptions, cleaves to an overwhelmingly nationalist/catastrophist perspective. If a journalist from Martian TV landed in Derry or Newry, they would probably leave with the idea that there is no border in Ireland at all, save for the new one perfidious Albion seems dead set on imposing on a thwarted, helpless population.