The Centre for Cross Border Studies

Cross-border cooperation in Ireland is not exactly trendy. Much of it involves the painstaking building of trust and relationships, often as a pre-requisite to working on practical joint projects. Almost by definition, such mundane, ‘under the radar’ work rarely gets a mention in the media. It’s probably just as well, since such politically [...]

On 13th December 1999 a long line of black Mercedes snaked across the border into Armagh for the first meeting of the new North/South Ministerial Council set up by the Good Friday Agreement the previous year to oversee the new cross-border ‘Strand Two’ institutions established by that Agreement.

There to meet them was the first group [...]

Gary McIntyre is a solicitor who works as an advice worker with Citizens Advice Northern Ireland in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh. For the past six years he has been employed by Borderwise, a cross-border partnership between Citizens Advice NI and the Citizens Information Board (Republic of Ireland) which was set up with EU PEACE funding in [...]

I make no apologies for returning to one of my pet subjects: the woeful state of the Belfast-Dublin rail service. We all know what happened on 20 August when the viaduct carrying the line across the Malahide estuary collapsed, narrowly avoiding a major disaster. We know something of what preceded that: as long ago as [...]

I think it would be fair to say that something like 90% of people in the Republic of Ireland never think about Northern Ireland these days, other than, very occasionally, as a place to go to do some cut-price shopping. The North doesn’t even enter their consciousness.

This is the Orange marching season. It is a traditionally a time of heightened inter-community tensions in Northern Ireland, when tens of thousands of Catholics and middle-class Protestants flee the province in order to avoid the ‘Twelfth’ and its accompanying displays of sectarian triumphalism. In the late-1990s the Portadown Orangemen’s insistence on marching from Drumcree [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]