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The invisible line that divides Northern Ireland from the Republic runs right through the middle of family homes, businesses, roads and even separates a church and a graveyard.

Mark Sugrue has captured just how hard it will be to divide the island again in the event of a no deal Brexit and hard border with a series of pictures.

The Limerick man said he was surprised to see his snapshots go viral, adding that they especially shocked people in England who had no idea of the situation.

He told Belfast Live he started looking at the border from above out of “curiosity”.

“I’m surprised these border images have surprised people,” said the 39-year-old software developer.

“I didn’t do any cutting edge research to find them - I literally just used Google maps with satellite view on and looked for oddities.

“There are lots and they are easy to find. I started at the M1 and worked west.”

The Irish border touches counties Armagh, Tyrone , Fermanagh and Derry in the North and Louth, Monaghan, Cavan and Leitrim and Donegal in the Republic.

Mark’s images showing just how closely bonded border communities are, have been shared by thousands online.

One shows how a church and graveyard are literally split by the border.

A social media user says the CoI church is no longer connected to the Catholic graveyard, but said parishioners buried in the Co Louth cemetery still went to Mass in Co Armagh .

“I wonder what export form you would need to fill in to bring the coffin from the church to the grave,” he asks.

The only driveway out of a house in Ireland is on the UK side, while some businesses are literally cut down the middle, as are lakes and a lot of roads.

Animals from the same farm graze on both sides of the dividing line, while Republic motorway the N1 even loses a chunk of its Northbound carriageway to the UK.

Dublin resident Mark said his tweets appear to have been an eye-opener for many.

He posted his thread, saying: “Some fun @BorderIrish crossings between Ireland and the UK. Would love to see ‘technology’ solve this... #brexit.”

And later said: “I think most of the people sharing the tweet are in England and they seem very surprised by the images. So maybe its been helpful in opening some eyes to the problem.

“I don’t know what will happen with the border. It would seem that a backstop or something similar would be the most logical solution.

“It would be a great shame to see billions spent on building a physical border when the money could be better spent on health and social needs.”

The UK is set to exit the EU on October 31 and with Boris Johnson in the driving seat, there is real fear there will be no deal with some experts warning of possible loss of 40,000 jobs in Northern Ireland.

In the event of ‘no deal’, customs controls will have to be placed along one of the most complex border crossings in Europe.

Yet comments making light of the situation continue.

Brexit Party London MEP Ben Habib came under fire for a video from the Irish border saying there “could never be a hard border here” and dubbing “the whole thing a red herring”.

Mark added: “One thing I find interesting about that kind of ‘border denial’ is back in 2016, Brexiteers campaigned on ‘take back control of our borders’ and now they’ve flipped to ‘border will never be controlled’. Quite the turnaround.”

A leaked confidential Whitehall document shared by Sky outlines how Republic and NI cross border agri-trade (around 65% of trade) will virtually stop one day one of Brexit, while small businesses in Northern Ireland will “face distress and law and order challenges” in the first month.

Work by Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) for Department of the Economy shows that 94% of exports from Northern Ireland to the Republic are made by the small and medium sized businesses which dominate our economy.

Their estimates suggest there were 758,000 cross border export deliveries to IE in 2016, worth around £3.42bn to the local economy in 2016 and a further 410,000 imports worth a further £2 billion - which the backstop was designed to protect.

The PSNI has also warned that any infrastructure on the border could lead to trouble, while 1,000 police officers in England, Scotland and Wales are being trained for deployment to Northern Ireland in the case of no-deal disorder.

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