What even is a border?

featuring the salmon of knowledge

What even is a border? I’m thinking about the now “invisible border” between Belfast and Dublin, where police stops from the Troubles have been removed yet the threat of customs checks (among many other issues) due to the fallout of Brexit have expedited not only nationalist desires for an United Ireland, but also encouraged political unionism to wheel out their Risk boardgames where once again, they can dot state infrastructures across Ulster, claiming the land, claiming its Britishness.  

This same “invisible border” (as of May 2023) which shoppers, day trippers and weekend tourists travel freely (now that Belfast is safe enough to visit) is also littered with bus coaches being pulled over onto the hard shoulder. On these Translink and Bus Eireann coaches, another slippery enaction of colonialism is wrought by the arbiters of the British and Irish state -  with both PSNI and Gardai working harmoniously to enact a “compartmentalized world” of “spatial apartheid” reminiscent of what Frantz Fanon speaks of in The Wretched of the Earth.  

What about borders such as the recent home-made ones in Co. Clare, where residents of Inch erected their own grubby checkpoints to barricade their town off from refugees and migrants. Rural Ireland, who sing songs and wax lyrical about our lost daughters and sons, fleeing to America (where we formed the racist police state and embraced white supremacy and capitalism with verve) clamping down on people fleeing poverty, persecution - or those who dare to envision a better life for themselves. 

Woven into this is of course, the enmeshment of the 26 counties with the EU – and of course if the northern counties had their opportunity, they would likely relish the same chances to look at the border policing in the Mediterranean Sea and take inspiration. Thinking about Inch and the recent burning of refugee and migrant camps in Dublin, words from Aimé Césaire come back to me over and over when post-WW2 he talked of a new Europe which “has gotten on very well indeed with all the local feudal lords who agreed to serve, rendering their tyranny more effective and efficient.” Certainly, for the right wing Irish zealots who puff and pomp over “indigeneity” and “protecting our women,” replicating the colonialist practices of the British, of the European project, “has grafted modern abuse onto ancient injustice, hateful racism onto old inequality” (Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism). 

And what of me? An aspirational middle-class, white, cis-gendered, thirty-something woman? As I grapple with the “invisible borders” of heteropatriarchy that inscribes a neoliberal and individualist family model on my body. Where “singleness” is seen as a failure to pair off and begin the next stage of life - nestling into a 2.4 children dynamic removed from community and existing in a state of isolation. Rather than “singleness” being a political choice and indeed my purposeful decision to dwell in opposition to these borders?

More currently, as a northerner now living in the 26 counties, the daily challenge is to stop myself from falling into the trap of seeking authentication of my “Irishness” from people who happen to have been born a few miles more to the south. Another invisible border - where geographical privilege somehow imbues the authority to validate what “Irishness” is and means.  

The young Derry journalist, Aoife Grace Moore (Twitter account now deleted) spoke recently of the attitudes of those in the south of Ireland towards the north and wondered whether this strange behaviour can be conceptualized as a coping mechanism – another hangover of colonialism where, like Césaire said, modern abuse has sprung out of ancient injustice. The harm and damage done to the 26 counties post-partition, the actions of successive Irish governments to choose social regression as opposed to progressivism in order to be seen as doing the opposite to the British – the installation of the catholic church as a deeply insidious new form of colonialism are all wounds felt here in the south - and from an onlooker’s perspective, these issues have not been dealt with despite moments of audible anguish being screamed in recent referendums on abortion and marriage equality and the #IrelandForAll movement.

Of course, in the north, there are borders on borders on borders. Intersectional borders. Invisible “no-go” areas that if you’re from a place, you just know it isn’t the right space to wear a rangers or celtic top respectively. For those who identify as women, a border is erected every day when the sun sets. Borders are erected when Canadian conglomerates mine Co. Tyrone - fencing off acres of land leased in perpetuity to the King, acquired back during the Nine Years’ War.  

Are we trapped in an ever-looping cycle of claiming borders, fighting borders, drawing borders on bodies? This behaviour has only one direction, slouching towards the far right where notions of superior nations and identities reign. Moments of hope glimmer with the Making Relatives meeting between Sperrin Mountain activists, Donegal and Leitrim clean water activists and their work with the Lakota Tribe who have been land and water defenders on Turtle Island for centuries. So too, Irish reproductive justice work has long dissolved borders with folks from across the island and internationally working together to empower access to healthcare north and south. There are moments where this small island demonstrates the potential it has to be an island for all, without borders, upending the power imbalances left by colonialism and breaking the harmful cycle of colonialist behaviours or traumatized coping mechanisms that manifest as knee-jerk rejections and individualist protectionism.  

What’s clear to me is that these goals will never be answered through electoral politics. It’s in community, and through “making relatives” with others that we can tap into the salmon of knowledge* and break down the grotesque borders on land and on our bodies that strangulate this island and consign us to active willing participants in its own demise.

*Thanks Áine, for invigorating conversations this weekend. My lack of knowledge on the praxis of indigenous histories, critiques and definitions leaves a big gap in this rambling.