The border region is often ignored in Irish historiography. Those who lived in the borderlands between Northern Ireland and independent Ireland found their lives and personal experiences were decided by high politics – the inter-governmental relations and decisions and diktats made in and between Dublin, Belfast and London rather than the local peculiarities forged by geography. This threw up all sorts of strange fracture points. Restrictions at the border, after partition, created new ‘social’ and ‘physical spaces’ that had hitherto not existed. The border itself was not conducive to a natural split. The twists and turns of the border as it ambled between the two jurisdictions, with few obvious natural barriers, made for one of the longest and most permeable borders in Europe. It created bizarre anomalies. Drummully in Monaghan, entirely surrounded by Fermanagh, was ‘cut off from the state to which it now belonged’. It was no wonder that the idea of a physical, political border was often considered ‘unnatural and against the grain of common sense’.
In his welcome new study, Peter Leary argues that the response to creation of the Irish border in the 1920s was not one of passive acceptance among border residents. Indeed, the border experience emphasises the limits of political power without local acceptance of that authority. The one chance to make a more coherent border and homogenous Northern Ireland, the Boundary Commission, ended in farce. The representations to the commission from both nationalists and unionists were dominated by the views of businessmen, politicians and farmers rather than the wishes of the ordinary man and woman, and this was reflected in the weight granted to economic factors. The border that was confirmed in 1925, marginalised mainly, if not exclusively, nationalist communities, who found themselves trapped on the wrong side of the line.
The border undoubtedly prompted resistance including numerous and mainly futile I.R.A. campaigns from 1921 to 1962. For most of the period covered by this study, it also justified a ‘moral economy’ by ‘alienated groups’ who believed that partition ‘gave them opportunities, to sometimes live differently, and act differently’. Leary shows the otherness of border communities by focusing on the ‘little histories’ using a ‘history from below’ approach.
Therefore, while for border residents as a whole, the economic and social disadvantages of partition were clear, the implementation of an international border was exploited on a local level. One such case was Foyle fishing rights. Both jurisdictions claimed rights to the Foyle and drawn out diplomatic and legal disputes helped local fishermen to fill the constitutional vacuum. Leary convincingly argues that ‘for several hundred part-time fishermen on the western banks on the Foyle, it was a tide for the taking’. Moreover, elements of the border populace were willing to exploit other opportunities. One of the more odd consequences of the border was a resurgence of cockfighting in border areas, as the offenders could jump rapidly from one jurisdiction to another if the law intervened.
‘Smuggling and borders are conjoined twins’ and the Irish border was no exception. Leary's work on this activity fills a lacuna in the scholarly literature, as it has not previously received such sustained attention. Significant events in Irish and British relations such as the economic war in the thirties, the Second World War and British farm policies in the 1950s and 1960s drove a thriving smuggling trade. He also demonstrates that there was a considerable rise in the number of women smuggling during the war years and after in an era of ‘rationing and shortages’, though it was not a new phenomenon. Nor was smuggling confined to the poor. Margaret Sutherland, from the Belfast's Malone Road, was prosecuted for smuggling tea in 1943. The intermixing of gender politics and smuggling was best described by a frustrated Dundalk Garda in 1940 who complained, that they needed more female searchers.
Smuggling was widely accepted in border societies even though the governments, Catholic church and Orange Order condemned such behaviour. This lack of ‘social stigma’, and for some a ‘liberating’ act despite the disapproval of powerful institutions, supports Leary's argument that these people were far from passive. This indicates that societal bonds and accepted norms predominated over hierarchical pronouncements of morality and patriotism.
From the 1920s to the 1970s, border-crossings were subject to negotiation, activity, reaction and counter reaction. In 1922, an I.R.A. kidnapping led the ‘North's martial forces’ to block or to blow up roads. Some border-crossings became the ‘unapproved routes’ of the book's title. In response to the I.R.A. border campaign (1956–1962), barricades were put up by the Northern authorities. Leary surmises the emerging tension between civil societies economic and social realities in contradiction to Belfast's policing strategy.
The recent Troubles once again changed the dynamic at the border. On 23 January 1972 in Aghafin, locals began work fixing a crater in the road deliberately created by British troops. Irish and British security officials were present on both sides of the border. The British army called for ‘civilians to disperse’. They ‘fired CS gas and rubber bullets’ across the border. However, after the army left, the locals returned, finished the job, raised the Irish tricolour and sang the national anthem. Similar incidents were common during the Troubles as the security requirements of the authorities in Northern Ireland clashed with geographical reality and outraged locals. Then the border went away, with customs posts, army watchtowers and cratered roads disappearing as the peace process took hold from the late 1990s. As we enter a new period of uncharted territory with talk of ‘hard’ borders returning, we should be grateful to Peter Leary for providing such an accomplished and enlightening account of a past many of us had thought had long been left behind.
