BorderIreland/Discuss

I’ve been thinking about knitting recently. It seems a good image for what those of us in the Centre for Cross Border Studies, Cooperation Ireland and other North-South ‘reconciliation’ bodies are trying to do: knitting damaged relationships between people and communities on this island back together again. Knitting is an activity usually done by women: it is slow, painstaking, meticulous, unglamorous and utterly unthreatening. When done well it produces articles of great beauty, which are at the same time useful, warm and comfortable. And more often than not it is done to produce gifts for people - husbands, children and other family members - whom the knitter loves.

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It didn’t come home to me how appallingly uncompetitive the Republic of Ireland has become until the Centre for Cross Border Studies interviewed candidates for the job of Deputy Director (Research) last month. Several youngish residents of the Republic working as middle-ranking officials and researchers with state bodies and earning in excess of €70,000 per year appeared before the interview panel. It was striking that their competitors for the job from Northern Ireland were earning not much more than half that extraordinarily high salary.

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George Newell is a community worker in a deprived area of East Belfast. He is also well-known in Drogheda, Monaghan and Donegal for the large numbers of working class Belfast Protestants he has brought across the border to experience life in the once feared and hated Irish Republic. He never appears in the media. He doesn’t win any awards. For much of the time he doesn’t even have a properly paid job. He is one more unsung and undecorated hero of cross-border cooperation in Ireland.

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For the past 10 years I have been travelling on the Dublin-Belfast Enterprise express up to four times every week. It is with genuine relief at the end of a hard week of cross-border cooperation that I collapse onto the homebound train from Newry to Dublin with a cup of tea or a can of stout and The Irish Times.

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Nine years ago I wrote an article¹ for the Irish Times recounting my travails, having moved from Dublin to Armagh to work for the Centre for Cross Border Studies, when I tried to open a cross-border bank account, buy a mobile phone which I could also use to ring Southern numbers, insure my car and do other normal things that one does when moving to a job in a neighbouring jurisdiction.

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Rev. Sean Nolan, parish priest of Errigal-Truagh in north Monaghan, is another of those tireless and unsung heroes of cross-border cooperation and reconciliation we rarely hear about. Like his unionist friend Billy Tate¹, he was toiling in this often stony field long before it became fashionable or fundable.

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There has been a lot said and written about cross-border shopping and patriotism in the weeks running up to Christmas. As a person with a passing interest in both subjects (the latter mainly on the terraces at Lansdowne Road), I wonder if I might add my two ha’apence.

Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan started it all with his unwise ‘call to patriotic action’ in urging Irish people to accept the harsh cuts of his October budget. He then compounded the error when he told RTE listeners last month: ‘When you shop in Northern Ireland, you’re paying Her Majesty’s taxes, you’re not paying taxes to the state that you live in.’ ¹

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The economies on this island are now in dire straits, in common with every other economy in Europe and North America. The governments in London and Dublin are struggling to cope with the short-term management of the worst international financial crisis in nearly 80 years. There is little or no time for long-term, let alone visionary, thinking about what their economies might look like in 20 or 25 years.

Does this mean that the concept of an ‘island of Ireland’ economy and the deep mutual learning between the two parts of the island that such a concept implies are off the table for the foreseeable future?  My strongest instincts tell me not – and I am looking at an address delivered by the prominent Irish economist Dr John Bradley to the British Irish Association conference in Oxford recently to support these instincts.

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One just can’t avoid the economy these days. By now it is old news that at the end of September and in early October the world was on the edge of a financial precipice not seen since the Wall Street Crash in 1929. The government of the Republic, whose banks and building societies were among the most exposed because of excessive and foolish lending to property developers, was forced to step in to provide an unprecedented blanket guarantee to protect their deposits and loans. Two weeks later the British government introduced a more measured package which involved taking a significant equity stake in the major UK banks.

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Why do governments so often choose to release some of their most interesting publications in the ‘dog days’ of the summer holidays? At the end of July the two Statistics Offices in Belfast and Cork quietly published the fourth edition of their compilation Ireland, North and South: A Statistical Profile¹. Inevitably the media missed it completely (or weren’t interested anyway). So here, two months late, are a few titbits from this carefully assembled comparison of statistics (which are usually for the period up to 2006-2007).

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