Katy Hayward - What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Irish Border? (What Do We Know and What Should We Do About:)

The Irish Border

For Elsa and Rosa, cross-border by nature and nurture.

Forthcoming:

Every news bulletin carries stories which relate in some way to the social sciences most obviously politics, economics and sociology, but also, often, anthropology, business studies, security studies, criminology, geography and many others.

Yet despite the existence of large numbers of academics who research these subjects, relatively little of their work is known to the general public.

There are many reasons for that, but, arguably, it is that the kinds of formats that social scientists publish in, and the way in which they write, are simply not accessible to the general public.

The guiding theme of this series is to provide a format and a way of writing which addresses this problem. Each book in the series is concerned with a topic of widespread public interest, and each is written in a way which is readily understandable to the general reader with no particular background knowledge.

The authors are academics with an established reputation and a track record of research in the relevant subject. They provide an overview of the research knowledge about the subject, whether this be long-established or reporting the most recent findings, widely accepted or still controversial. Often in public debate there is a demand for greater clarity about the facts, and that is one of the things the books in this series provide.

However, in social sciences, facts are often disputed and subject to different interpretations. They do not always, or even often, speak for themselves'. The authors therefore strive to show the different interpretations or the key controversies about their topics, but without getting bogged down in arcane academic arguments.

Not only can there be disputes about facts but also there are almost invariably different views on what should follow from these facts. And, in any case, public debate requires more of academics than just to report facts; it is also necessary to make suggestions and recommendations about the implications of these facts.

Thus each volume also contains ideas about what we should do within each topic area. These are based upon the authors knowledge of the field but also, inevitably, upon their own views, values and preferences. Readers may not agree with them, but the intention is to provoke thought and well-informed debate.

Katy Hayward is Professor of Political Sociology in Queen's University Belfast and a Senior Fellow in the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, where she leads a project on The future and status of Northern Ireland after Brexit'. She is the author of many publications, including a series of research reports (20172021) for the Irish Central Border Area Network on the impact of the UKEU negotiations on the border region. In 2019, she was appointed to the technical expert panel of the UK government's Alternative Arrangements Advisory Group on Brexit. She was named Political Studies Communicator of the year (2019) by the Political Studies Association (UK) and her Twitter account (@hayward_katy) received a special award from the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize in 2020 for illuminating and explaining the implications of Brexit for the island of Ireland.

When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not.

(John McGahern, 2005)

Perhaps the most difficult thing to explain about the Irish border is the importance of its insignificance. After the UK's Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016,1 a steady stream of European dignitaries came to Ireland to visit the border. And there they posed for remarkably dull photographs. Ambassadors, ministers and diplomats stood at the point in a country lane where a dashed yellow line became a solid white one, or between two road signs giving the speed limit in kilometres per hour then miles per hour. Journalists struggled to make the photo ops anything other than clichd. But the very invisibility of the border was the thing they were there to point out. Although it was easy to spot on a map, the border was difficult to locate on the ground'.2 People did not give it a second thought when crossing it. As a feature of daily life and conversation, the Irish border could all too easily be forgotten about. The visitors came to pay tribute to the fact that this boundary line was, to all intents and purposes, non-existent. The fact that the Irish border had become one of the most seamless and frictionless borders in the world had come to be taken for granted. After decades of diversions, checkpoints and political obsession, moving, trading and working across the border had become both easy and unremarkable. It was this absence of a border that was felt to be suddenly in danger of being lost all as a consequence of the actions of the neighbouring country, and all subject now to the UK's exit negotiations with the EU. Quite unexpectedly, people on the island of Ireland were having to explain to British and European observers why it was that the openness of the Irish border was so precious. This proved a more difficult task than we might have imagined it would be.