The Phantom Border

September 25, 2022

It’s Sunday morning, and I am not going to Mass. That’s nothing exceptional here in the new, secular Ireland—but religion still defines communities along the border.

“Ye know,” says Kenny, “in the State schools they teach the counties of Northern Ireland as FAT LAD. In the Catholic schools, it’s FAT DAD.” When I look a little confused, he winks at me. “Ye know—Derry, right?” We are in Lisnaskea, Co. Fermanagh, where Kenny is Director of an NGO supporting victims of the Troubles.

Oh, right; I get it. I suppose you have to be from this part of the world to get the point. FAT LAD is Fermanagh, Antrim, Tyrone, Londonderry, Armagh, Down. But, though Londonderry is the official name, it’s Derry to Catholics—a naming dispute that goes back to 1613—so for Catholics, you have “D” instead of “L”.

It seems silly, but here, small details have big consequences. Even before I met Kenny, I knew from his name that he was Protestant (though he did assure me that there were some Catholic Donaldsons around). In his forties, he sits behind a plywood desk at the back of a warehouse. When I enter the dimly-lit office, he rises—he is taller than I imagined from our Zoom calls—and comes around to welcome me, with a beaming smile.

He is full of stories. His was one of the few, beleaguered, Protestant families in Crossmaglen, the heart of what came to be known as “Bandit Country” for its Republican leanings during the Troubles between the 1970s and the 1990s. He received plenty of abuse, and had no hesitation in reminding his abusers that his family had been around for twelve generations, while theirs were “cattle thieves who were bucked out of Scotland only six generations ago,” he grins.

You may think of all these distinctions as ancient history, but they are very much alive here on the border—a phantom border that doesn’t exist in physical form, but lives on, like a dormant virus. “Ninety-five percent of those crimes [in the Troubles] have never been solved,” said Kenny. What does that do to a small community, when you know that the man who killed your father, your uncle, your sister, walks free and drinks in your local pub?

The 1998 peace agreement may have put a halt to the violence, but it solved nothing. Protestants and Catholics still don’t mix, and 90% of children in Northern Ireland go to schools dominated by one religion. “Integrated” schools are rare. The regional parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly, has been suspended because of differences over Brexit—differences that, like all politics here, are underpinned by loyalties to one side or the other.

Even as things stay the same, everything is changing. Immigrants from conflict-torn parts of the world are settling in this superficially peaceful area; yet since 2016, Brexit has threatened new trouble. Just this week, we learned that Catholics now outnumber Protestants in the North; nobody yet knows what this will mean in a state that was built by Protestants, for Protestants.

Back in the South, I have coffee at a local golf club with my sister Barbara. A chunky fruit scone sits between us, dusted with icing sugar and flanked by cream and jam. A former TV personality, Barbara has travelled widely and is worldly and cosmopolitan.

“Would you like the Protestant side, or the Catholic side?” she asks, knife poised to cut it horizontally. She’s joking of course, but she reminds me that in our home in the South, the Catholic side of the bread was the round top, the Protestant side the flat bottom. I have no idea why. But details matter, on the phantom border.