Nobody wants a hard border, which might include passport and customs controls. Yet there is no sign of agreement over how to avoid one

THE main characteristic of the border between the Irish republic and Northern Ireland is its absence. Driving from south to north, the only detectable change on entering the United Kingdom is that road signs switch colour and Union flags flutter from lamp-posts. Ironically, the clearest evidence that you are in a different country is loud posters screaming: “No EU frontier in Ireland.”

During the Troubles of the 1960s-90s, the border was dotted with army checkpoints and watchtowers, as well as (until 1993) customs controls. The melting away of the militarised frontier into a mere line on a map was perhaps the most visible achievement of the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 accord that largely brought an end to three decades of violence.

Yet there is a serious risk that a hard border could return. After Brexit, this will be the only land boundary between Britain and the European Union. Theresa May’s government is insisting that Britain must leave the EU’s single market and customs union, and it wants to impose restrictions on migration from the EU. At first blush, all these seem to imply a need for both frontier and customs controls at the Irish border. Michel Barnier, the European Commission’s Brexit negotiator, declared in Brussels recently that post-Brexit trade cannot be “frictionless”.

There ought to be an effective answer to such a gloomy prediction. Nobody, whether in Dublin, Belfast, London or Brussels, favours a hard border. Indeed, the European Council’s guidelines for the Brexit negotiations call for one to be avoided through “flexible and imaginative solutions”. The issue is salient today because, thanks to deft Irish diplomacy, it is one of the first three items on the agenda; indeed, it has been elevated to the highest diplomatic level in the negotiations. Ireland is deeply troubled by the prospect of Brexit. Although its trade has diversified over the past four decades, its neighbour is its second-biggest trading partner. The UK exports more to Ireland than to Brazil, India, Japan and South Africa combined. A new Irish Senate report suggests that Brexit could reduce Irish GDP by 3.5%, roughly as much as the likely loss to British GDP. The Irish economy is already suffering from a post-referendum fall in sterling, which has hit Ireland’s agri-food business hard. Several mushroom farmers have gone under. Big firms may cope with extra expenses, and Ireland could gain some investment after Brexit, notably in financial services, as firms leave London for Dublin. But smaller businesses with low margins fret that the return of a border will add to their costs. If the mood in the republic is gloomy, it is glummer in the north, which voted to stay in the EU by 56% to 44%. Already the prospect of Brexit has diverted some investment south. Almac, a drug firm in Craigavon, has opened a new facility in Dundalk specifically to preserve its position in the single market. Worse still is the outlook for firms that have built cross-border supply chains (see article). The risk of a hard border is a concern not just for farmers, traders and migrants. It could also upset Northern Ireland’s peace process. Jonathan Powell, who was closely involved in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement as chief of staff to Tony Blair, says that its success relied on exploiting the two countries’ EU membership to park the issue of Irish or British identity. Cathy Gormley-Heenan of Ulster University echoes the point when she says: “The EU took the border out of Irish politics, but the Brexit referendum has put it back.”

The uncertainty over the border comes at a particularly tricky political moment in the province. The Northern Ireland power-sharing executive has been out of action since January, with the Democratic Unionist Party and the nationalist Sinn Fein unable to agree on the terms for its resumption. The DUP is also formally propping up Mrs May’s government in Westminster, which makes nationalists doubly suspicious of London. Nobody predicts that violence is about to return to Northern Ireland. But a return to a hard border would further destabilise an already fragile political situation. One peace-loving old-timer jokes that he would personally blow up any installation erected on the border.

Brexiteers tend to dismiss all this as fearmongering. They point out that the common travel area (CTA) between Britain and Ireland dates back to 1922, long before the EU existed. The Good Friday Agreement was essentially a bilateral one. As for customs controls, a combination of smart technology, pre-clearance, electronics and checkpoints some way back from the border could surely handle them without the need for physical intervention at the frontier itself. Norway and Sweden manage to avoid long queues, as do Switzerland and Germany. Lee Reynolds, a Democratic Unionist who ran the province’s Leave campaign last year, proposes what he calls an “e-border”.

Papers, please

Yet this is too sanguine. Most people will no doubt continue to move freely across the border, but the CTA applies only to British and Irish citizens. There are said to be some 30,000 other EU citizens in the north and perhaps 200,000 in the south. Many cross the border in both directions every day. If Britain were to bring in tight controls on EU migrants, some of these people could be caught by them.

Customs is an even thornier issue. Jerome Mullen, a veteran businessman in Newry, bitterly recalls the days when his lorries were stopped and inspected by customs agents in both the north and the south, creating costly delays. Since the border disappeared in the 1990s, there have been far more crossings. A 500-km (310-mile) border with some 300 crossing points (many more than in Norway or Switzerland) and even more unofficial pathways is all but impossible to monitor. Several farms straddle the border. And this is a region with a long tradition of smuggling which continues to this day, now mostly of diesel.

Is there a solution? The Centre for Cross-Border Studies in Armagh has joined many others in proposing a special status for Northern Ireland that, in effect, keeps it in the customs union and perhaps the single market even if the rest of Britain is out. But this has been rejected by the European Parliament and is not welcomed by many in Ireland, because it would imply a border in the Irish Sea instead, disrupting trade with the British mainland, which is far bigger than trade with Northern Ireland. Another idea is to give firms doing cross-border business the status of “authorised economic operators”, which would be a way of allowing customs duties to be collected regularly without physical inspection. But any such system would be open to abuse.

Nationalists suggest that the answer is a united Ireland, a possibility explicitly referred to by the European Council. But for now majority opinion in the north is against this. A more fanciful suggestion in a recent paper written by Ray Bassett, a former Irish diplomat, for Policy Exchange, a London-based think-tank, is “Irexit”: that Ireland should follow Britain out of the EU. Whatever Brexiteers may hope for, this has no chance of being adopted in Dublin.

Mr Powell reckons that the only way to avert the reintroduction of a hard border is for Britain to stay in both the single market and the customs union. But Mrs May’s government continues to rule this out. That leaves no easy solutions to the border problem. As Angela McGowan of the Confederation of British Industry in Northern Ireland concludes, there have so far been only questions, not answers.