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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again. With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A warning that today's episode features some graphic descriptions of violence near the top and the bottom of this first half. There's no violence after the break if you want to avoid it altogether. Let's begin. Tonight, believe it or not, the United Kingdom will officially leave the European Union. It happens at 11 o'clock London time. Brexit is happening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have covered Brexit backwards and forwards on Today Explained. We've talked about trade and immigration and ideology, and it's all been sort of abstract, very political. But on the show today, our reporter Noam Hassenfeld is going to take us to a place where you can actually see what Brexit might do with your own eyes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, and in the interest of minimizing my carbon footprint, I got someone closer to go for me. My name is Leona O'Neill, and I'm a journalist from Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, but it shares a border with the independent country of Ireland to the south.
--:-- Leona O'Neill: I am on the border between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. It's just outside Derry. It's a very, very, very busy road. I've pulled to the side of the road here. There's literally hundreds of cars going up and down past me here.
--:-- Leona O'Neill: Right now, since both the United Kingdom and Ireland are in the European Union, that border is barely noticeable. But after tonight, while the country of Ireland will still be in the EU, things start to get complicated at the border. Brexit has posed a particularly difficult and unique problem for us.
--:-- Leona O'Neill: Brexit could bring checkpoints, police, the military, but that's nothing new for this border. When you say the border, the Northern Irish border, people think, they hark back to those days when there were huge big military installations where the British Army would be there. You know, there'd be checkpoints and stuff like that.
--:-- Leona O'Neill: There is nothing like that now at the moment. It's something that's kind of forgotten about almost. It's an invisible border. When I was growing up here beside the border, you know, you would approach the border. There were huge, big military installations, you know, corrugated iron walls, heavily fortified, full of soldiers, armed soldiers.
--:-- Leona O'Neill: So sometimes your car would be pulled in, everybody would be taken out of the car, the car would be searched for guns and ammunition and all that kind of stuff. These military installations were shot at, they were bombed. You were almost taking your life in your hands, stopping at them while you were passing, particularly with children in the car.
--:-- Leona O'Neill: It was quite a terrifying experience. This peaceful spot where I am sitting right now, 30 years ago, it was a living nightmare.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 1990, Patsy Gillespie was a young father. The IRA, the Irish Republican Army, were targeting Patsy Gillespie because he worked in a British Army station here in Derry. They held his wife and his children hostage and told Patsy to get in his van and drive it to the British Army station here, the checkpoint in Cosh Quinn.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They said he didn't do that, that they would shoot his wife and his children. This is Patsy's wife, Kathleen. He was chained to the driver's seat and the steering wheel of that. it was loaded with 1200 pounds of explosives and he was made to drive the van to the army checkpoint at Coshquan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He had time to shout a warning and I was told by one of the soldiers who survived that they heard, run boys, I'm loaded, run. And the bomb was detonated by remote control and Patsy was blown to pieces with five soldiers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Patsy was actually identified by a piece of grey zip attached to a piece of the woolen cardigan and a bit of flesh. To this day, Kathleen remembers Patsy on the border. I'm sitting here actually across the road from the memorial. Patsy's wife Kathleen leaves flowers. I can see them sitting here. She leaves flowers every week there for her patsy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Brexit isn't just bringing these memories back. It actually might disrupt this hard-fought peace. I know from speaking to dissident Republicans in the past that should any structure go up on the border, any kind of even a sign that says this is the border, they will blow it up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anyone who puts the life of a customs officer at risk, they will need police protection. The police are then become a target as well as a customs officer. If there are attacks on them, the army might be brought back to protect the police who are protecting the customs officer. And then we're back in the 1970s, 1980s Northern Ireland.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have a very delicate peace here in Northern Ireland. Anything could just put it over the edge. Peace in Northern Ireland isn't just delicate. It took decades of civilian uprisings, military crackdowns, and brutal terrorist campaigns to reach this point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thousands of people died in the process. And the peace deal that created this invisible border was an almost impossible balancing act. Ireland was part of the British Empire up until the beginning of the 20th century. And this was not a situation which was desired by the majority of people in Ireland.
--:-- Susan McKay: People there often call it Derry. There was a smaller Protestant minority concentrated in the northeast of Ireland, which did not want to be part of a united Ireland. So in 1921, Ireland was partitioned. The South was independent, while the North remained part of the United Kingdom.
--:-- Susan McKay: A border was put across the country and it an extraordinary border You know it zigzags all over the place it cuts off one County Donegal practically from the rest of the Republic of Ireland And it divides villages it divides houses it divides people's farms.
--:-- Susan McKay: This is Pindana, a small, rather old-fashioned town in County Tyrone, one of the six northeastern counties of Ireland which are held under British rule. The situation in the north was that the Unionists, who were those who were loyal to Britain, set up the northern state in such a way that Catholics and nationalists could really have no power.
--:-- Susan McKay: Two-thirds of the people of this little town are nationalists. That is to say, they are in favour of unity with the rest of Ireland and against being treated as part of Britain. One-third is unionist, which means favouring British rule and the partition of Ireland.
--:-- Susan McKay: But the town is controlled by that unionist minority and run solely in their interest. So the upshot of this gerrymandering, as it was called, was that the Catholic population lived in extremely disadvantaged circumstances, in crowded areas.
--:-- Susan McKay: They didn't have power, their unemployment was very high, and they were extremely unhappy about the state. In the 1960s, things changed. With the advent of television and with the advent of second-level education for larger numbers of people, the civil rights movement rose up about housing issues and employment issues, and it was met by the northern state with a very violent response.
--:-- Susan McKay: Civil rights protests against alleged discriminations were regarded at first as no more than a nuisance. But as they continued and became more insistent and extreme, petrol bombs ominously replaced stones as the main weapons.
--:-- Susan McKay: This was the beginning of what people call the Troubles. Nationalists and Republicans fighting against Unionists, Loyalists and British troops. And regular people caught in the middle.
--:-- Susan McKay: Into the middle of that scenario, the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, began to build up force, and that was very much accelerated in January 1972, when Bloody Sunday occurred, and that was a notorious massacre of innocent civil rights marchers by a British regiment called the Paratroopers.
--:-- Susan McKay: 13 people were killed. None of them were armed. So a lot of people started to join the IRA at that point. You had appalling incidents, including Bloody Friday, when the IRA planted a lot of bombs in the shopping streets of Belfast, indiscriminately killing civilians.
--:-- Susan McKay: On that day, Belfast was attacked with 27 bombs in one afternoon. Nine died and over 130 injured. And you had loyalists going into collusion with renegade members of the British security forces, killing Catholics in isolated areas around the country.
--:-- Susan McKay: In 1981, the British government tried to remove political status from IRA prisoners. And as a result, the IRA prisoners went on hunger strike and Margaret Thatcher refused to relent.
--:-- Susan McKay: Crime is crime is crime. It is not political, it is crime. And there can be no question of political status. By the time a negotiation was reached, 10 of them had died.
--:-- Susan McKay: And by the early years of the 1990s, the people of Northern Ireland were just completely approaching despair. I covered the Troubles as a reporter. What was that experience like?
--:-- Susan McKay: Well, being a reporter during the conflict meant going to a lot of funerals. It meant attending a lot of scenes where very violent incidents had happened. It meant talking to people who were in a state of shock and grief.
--:-- Susan McKay: And many journalists like me had to go to people's houses the morning after somebody had been killed and do interviews with bereaved families. And you've been following up with some of them?
--:-- Susan McKay: Yeah, I went back to many of the families that I had first met when they were first bereaved. They're all very powerful and all very moving, but a few of them did particularly stick in my mind. One of them was the story of James Morgan, which was told by his mother, Philomena.
--:-- Philomena Morgan: James was, he was a 16-year-old. He was just like any other normal, happy-go-lucky 16-year-old. So on that day, James went to meet his friend, Nathan, about maybe about 200 to 300 yards up the road. He never made it. He was picked up and they beat him round the head with a hammer and they killed him.
--:-- Philomena Morgan: and they buried him in an animal pit. We didn't know where he was when we looked for him. Then a detective arrived to tell us. So that's where I got the news from.
--:-- Philomena Morgan: The troubles seemed to be far from here, but it never even entered our heads that something like this could happen in a small village. but it did, and it changed things forever.
--:-- Philomena Morgan: James Morgan was murdered by Loyalists in 1997 near his home in the Mountains of Mourne. And when it went to go, the judge said it was utterly sectarian. He was murdered for his religion.
--:-- Philomena Morgan: And for a long time after it, it was very nervy because I couldn't sleep. The rest of the boys were all late teens. would they be picked up? Would they meet the wrong person? Would they go down a road that you didn't want them to go down?
--:-- Philomena Morgan: You know, Father Doris used to say if you get a good day, take it and if you can laugh, laugh. And that's what we took his advice and that's what we did.
--:-- Philomena Morgan: People's lives were just ruined and people had to come to terms with immense pain. And many, many people are still struggling with that pain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Somehow, after all that pain, both sides made peace in 1998. And now Brexit might unmake it. More in a minute on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Time says with qualifying direct deposits you can be eligible for free overdraft up to on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank NA or Stride Bank NA. Members FDIC. Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission of payment file. Fees apply at out-of-network ATMs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bank ranking and number of ATMs according to U.S. News and World Report 2023. Shine checking account required. This message is brought to you by Apple Card.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers. The titanium Apple Card is no different. It's laser-etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now beneath the pyramid penthouse of Stormont's castle buildings, the final scenes of this extraordinary political drama are about to be acted out. April 10th, 1998. Belfast, Northern Ireland.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hours past a midnight deadline. Dawn broke at Stormont with the deadline for agreement well passed and the chances of a deal emerging seemingly slim. It's Good Friday, the most somber day on the calendar for both Catholics and Protestants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's all about death, sacrifice, and the anticipation of rebirth. There was a growing feeling of anticipation as the conviction grew that they were witnessing history in the making.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All parties have been invited — the largely Protestant Unionists, along with hardline Loyalist groups, and the largely Catholic Nationalists, along with hardline Republican groups. here at Stormont veered almost by the hour between confidence that a deal was tantalizingly close to fears that these talks, even as the finish line loomed into sight, could still stumble.
--:-- David Trimble: We see this as laying the foundations for a healthy, vibrant democracy to replace the stagnation, frustration, and powerlessness of the last three decades.
--:-- Gerry Adams: These negotiations and the new arrangements which result from them are part of our collective journey from the failures of the past towards a future together as equals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As day stretches into evening, the mediator, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, makes an announcement almost a century in the making.
--:-- George Mitchell: I'm pleased to announce that the two governments and the political parties of Northern Ireland have reached agreement.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: They had entered a situation of what you might call a mutually hurting stalemate, where, you know, they weren't going to achieve their objectives through force, but neither could the British government impose its authority by force either.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: So they came up with a compromise with two parts. One was the relationships within Northern Ireland, the power relationships. The deal promised that nationalists and unionists would always be represented in Northern Ireland's government.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: Both sides compromised but got something. And what they got was to share power within Northern Ireland based on power sharing. Part two, the bigger picture. On the one hand, it promised that Northern Ireland would stay part of the United Kingdom.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: But on the other hand, there was a provision for what's called a border poll, meaning that at any point in the future, there could be a referendum where the people of Northern Ireland would vote on whether to join a united Ireland.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: Or as British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it, Those who believe in a united Ireland can make that case now by persuasion, not violence or threats. And if they voted in favor of United Ireland, the British government was duty-bound to legislate for it.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: It was almost as if the deal was saying something different to each side. For Unionists, this deal was ideally the end. But for Nationalists, they would never have agreed to it if they had been sold it as an end in itself.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: So certainly it was presented as a stepping stone. For one side, the deal affirmed that Northern Ireland was a permanent part of the United Kingdom. For the other side, the door was open for Northern Ireland to join the rest of Ireland.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: Everybody gets a little bit of what they want. Nobody gets everything, but everybody gets enough to sell it to their supporters. It was kind of confusing, but that was by design.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: The term that they used was constructive ambiguity. You try and massage the unpalatable details to a certain degree when people are signing up to something, but ultimately then you need to inject the money, the changed institutions very quickly afterwards so that people don't have time to go back and have this so-called buyer's remorse.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: There was no perfect solution to the issue of the border, so the plan sidestepped it, hoping the problem might improve with time.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: The miracle of the Good Friday Agreement is that it's not, as is often touted, a conflict resolution situation. This is conflict management. We haven't, in a sense, dismantled the sectarian mindsets that exist in Northern Ireland.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: Only the guns have been put aside, but not the divisive mentalities. And that's, of course, evident to anybody who visits Northern Ireland. When we've done all these different things, institutional change, constitutional change, you still have a problem of attitudes not having changed.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: Even in Belfast, for example, the largest city, there are kilometres upon kilometres of walls which divide both communities. Most were built during the Troubles, but some have gone up even since the peace agreement.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: If you are from one community, you can spend your entire life growing up without meeting or having a serious conversation with somebody from the other community.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: 90% of Northern Ireland students study exclusively with members of their own community. You get employed in a different area, you read different newspapers, you play different sports.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: So Northern Ireland remains very divided. What the Good Friday Agreement did is that it regulated the conflict in such a way that people didn't feel it was worthwhile killing each other to resolve it.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: All the while, the Northern Irish border has remained almost invisible. It's one that divides farms, it divides families. It's an unnatural border. And what the Good Friday Agreement managed to do was to make that border invisible.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: And what Brexit has done is it has reintroduced the threat of a visible border back on the island of Ireland, one that would be what they call a hard border, customs posts, security.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: and that's something that, of course, everybody who was involved in the Good Friday Agreement is trying to prevent. Tonight Brexit deadline doesn say much about what the deal will look like in practice It symbolism The real negotiations are still yet to take place and when the trade agreement is negotiated the United Kingdom will have to make a choice
--:-- Danica Obahoin: The UK is going to have to figure out its trade borders all over again. And it's talking about drawing one in the Irish Sea, which more or less allows for continuing free trade within the island of Ireland.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: But a de facto border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, This trade border would split a country, Northern Ireland on one side and the rest of the UK on the other.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: But the other option could be even riskier. Option two would risk undoing the Good Friday Agreement by rebuilding the land border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: That border between North and South will become the international border between the European Union and the United Kingdom. And it will have to be policed. It will be visible.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: And the history of Ireland suggests that once you have a visible border, it becomes a target. then you will have to have reinforcements to defend it from attack, and you end in an escalating situation which leads to widespread conflict.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: The history of the Troubles makes the risk of a rebuilt land border clear. But for Unionists in Northern Ireland, a border in the Irish Sea could be dangerous too.
--:-- Ben Lowry: This is a massive change. The impact of being edged out of the economic territory of your own nation is a very serious one. But for Ben, it's not a shocking result.
--:-- Ben Lowry: Very many people in England, when put to the test, are not bothered in the least at the prospect of Northern Ireland leaving. And that is something that must concentrate the minds of those of us unionists who think carefully about what the future means.
--:-- Ben Lowry: A 2019 poll found that among pro-Brexit English voters, almost three quarters said they didn't care if Brexit led to the breakup of the UK. And 80% said that Brexit is worth it, even if it unravels the peace process in Northern Ireland.
--:-- Ben Lowry: As for those in Northern Ireland... The arguments in favor of Brexit from a Northern Ireland perspective are that the European Union is a fundamentally incoherent system, that it tries too many things that are the preserve of the nation state.
--:-- Ben Lowry: Essentially the same argument made by the rest of Britain, that a nation should make choices for itself. Think of the person in Northern Ireland who thinks of themselves as part of the United Kingdom, who doesn't think about it very much, but then accepts that when the nation has decided to move on a major constitutional matter, then we as an integral part of that nation should move with it.
--:-- Ben Lowry: I think the simple truth is that because it all happened relatively quickly, I don't think a lot of thought was given to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
--:-- Ben Lowry: So Brexit's left unionists with a lot of questions. What do we do if England and the rest of the UK don't want Northern Ireland? What do we do if independence is not feasible? And what do we do if people in the Republic of Ireland don't want Northern Ireland?
--:-- Ben Lowry: You know, we could just be this unwanted place that's in limbo forever. Those are genuine concerns coming from a guy who was once bullish on Brexit.
--:-- Ben Lowry: If you'd asked me 10 years ago, I was a big supporter of Brexit because I thought that the cultural gulf between the United Kingdom and the mainland Europe was too great. And in theory, it still seems to have a lot of sense to it.
--:-- Ben Lowry: But in practice, it would be problematic and potentially disastrous. Brexit just doesn't have a good solution that satisfies everyone.
--:-- Ben Lowry: For most people, the best solution was exactly the way things were, a tentative, fragile status quo. And Danica Obachoin says that was the miracle of the Good Friday Agreement.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: The whole idea of the Good Friday Agreement was to postpone the constitutional issue for at least a generation. Let's get people of different political aspirations working together for a generation or two.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: And then when they're used to working together within Northern Ireland, then we can delicately put the question, if a majority suggests it will happen, that we would maybe have a united Ireland.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: And what Brexit did is that it refocused attention on the constitutional issue. And all that work that had been put into de-emphasizing the border, de-emphasizing sovereignty, de-emphasizing constitutional questions, that was now back front and center of practical politics.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: That de-emphasis seemed to be working. In a recent survey, half of the people in Northern Ireland considered themselves to be neither unionist nor nationalist.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: And the younger they were, the more neutral they got. The younger generation don't remember what the conflict was like. I mean, I'm a professor, as I said, in the university. I have 20-something students in front of me. It's just remarkable.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: It makes me feel, of course, incredibly old that they don't remember a conflict in Northern Ireland. I guess the fear is that as you have a generation who don't know the price of peace, who haven't felt the hurt and the devastation that conflict can cause, that this could be thrown away.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: So certainly peace is not to be taken for granted. The Good Friday Agreement is, in many respects, a miraculous achievement. I think what's so miraculous here is how rare it is that conflicts like this get resolved diplomatically without one side just surrendering.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: Think about what something like this would mean for Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, or even Ukraine and Russia. I know none of these conflicts is exactly like the other, and even in Northern Ireland's case, the peace plan didn't solve everything.
--:-- Danica Obahoin: But the miracle here is that two sides that were at each other's throats for almost a century actually came together. They talked. They decided on a fragile peace. And it actually worked. And then people forgot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to Susan McKay, who allowed us to use the audio she recorded of Kathleen Gillespie and Philomena Morgan. Those interviews are part of the series Stories from Silence, which you can find at storiesfromsilence.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Susan's also working on a book about Protestants in Northern Ireland and another one all about borders. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The rest of our team here at Today Explained is Bridget McCarthy, Halima Shah, Amna Alsadi, Jillian Weinberger, and Afim Shapiro.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder provides music. We had a mashup from Jeff Geld this week, an extra hands on deck belonging to Roger Karma and Bird Pinkerton.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our fact checker, Olivia Ekstrom, is moving on from facts. We wish her all the best and thank her for all of her checks. Our new fact checker is Cecilia Lay. Welcome, Cecilia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Get in touch. Our email address is todayexplained at vox.com.
