Brexit’s Home Front

Nobody wants a return to war in Northern Ireland but events can create their own momentum

The 310-mile-long border that divides the north from the Irish Republic is a trip wire which has the capacity to trigger a political explosion, writes Patrick Cockburn from Belfast

Monday 18 March 2019 13:04 GMT
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British soldiers stop a man trying to carry his baby through a  barricade on the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast in August 1969
British soldiers stop a man trying to carry his baby through a barricade on the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast in August 1969

At the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s I used to visit Crossmaglen, a village in South Armagh close to the border with the Irish Republic and notorious as an Irish Republican stronghold.

I would go there with my friend Ben Caraher, a teacher in Belfast who came from the village and was a low profile but important figure in the moderate nationalist SDLP.

Once we were taking a walk along a road in the pretty countryside outside the village, when Ben remarked that one day the natural beauty of the place might attract tourists.

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