John Sheridan, a beef and sheep farmer, and the 1,150 acres he farms in Co Fermanagh are hemmed in by the Border. That does not matter; an invisible Border as it exists now means he can trade across the "economic island", as he calls it. Brexit and the prospect of a hard border threatens to change all that.
“It is going to leave me like a postage stamp on an envelope,” he said.
“In southwest Fermanagh, I am curtailed by the Border by about a 45-degree angle and after that I am cut off 315 degrees as to where I can go. That is not good for someone who has enjoyed 360 degrees of travel even in the worst of the Troubles.”
A prominent member of the Border Communities Against Brexit group, Sheridan lives a few kilometres from Blacklion, Co Cavan and a tiny bridge over a stream that marks one of about 275 Border crossings along the 500-km Border. A few kilometres further along is the main Border crossing to Belcoo, Co Fermanagh. To reach his closest post office, he must travel into the Republic and back into the North again.
Blink and you would miss the road signs showing you have passed from one jurisdiction to another.
Sheridan remembers the Troubles well in this area: a female neighbour being stopped and searched by the UDR in Belcoo and the “chill” he felt as she looked to him for help; a local man being ordered to drive an IRA car bomb into Blacklion; the “unapproved” road at the bridge being blocked off by the British Army.
Today, with EU and UK negotiators still trying to find answers to the Irish border question, he sees technological solutions to maintain an open border as “totally unworkable and unacceptable”.
“This is borderisation by layer by layer by layer. There is no such thing as a soft border. A soft border will become a hard border over time because layer upon layer of bureaucracy will come upon it because, as they see it, we will have to legislate for this and legislate for that,” he said.
Livelihood
Sheridan’s family business, Legnabrocky Farms, has about 130 cows and up to 500 sheep but he sees his livelihood coming under threat from cheap meat imports from non-EU countries and the loss of the EU subsidies under the single farm payment scheme affecting farmers across Northern Ireland after Brexit.
“If I see a hard border coming in, I’m not going to have sheep and I am going to advise the directors of the company to close down, in as much as possible,” he said.
Sheridan’s best friend from childhood, John Elliott, lives a few kilometres away right next to the Border bridge. He lives in the North but sources his electricity from a transformer just across a ditch in the South.
Elliott laughs at the prospect of this road becoming hardened again post-Brexit.
“It’s rooms high up where those decisions are made. You’d have gas trouble getting the animals over and back,” he said.
“It doesn’t affect us as much as people going back and forth to work from Blacklion to Derrylin.”
As cars speed by his farmhouse, over the Border bridge, he says: “It is a busy road this.”
