Patrick Radden Keefe (2:38)

And what happened was that that border, that source of tension, this place where there were gun turrets and, you know, guys with guns who would check your vehicle as you were passing through and Check your papers. It seemed to just melt away.

Mary Casey (2:53)

An agreement that unites loyal and republican, unionist and nationalist leaders in a wide ranging historical accord.

Patrick Radden Keefe (3:01)

Until 2016, the British people have voted.

Archive/Newscaster (3:04)

To leave the European Union and their will.

Patrick Radden Keefe (3:07)

When voters in the United Kingdom voted for Brexit, the question of the border suddenly became very fraught. Because when the UK leaves the EU and Ireland stays in the eu, then that soft border between Ireland and Northern Ireland could suddenly change dramatically. It would have to have customs checkpoints, immigration checkpoints. It becomes a hard border, basically patrolled by authorities on both sides. And that would immediately threaten the peace that's mostly held on the island for 20 years now.

Simon Carswell (3:38)

It's a very complex border. It is 300 miles long. The border weaves in and out of villages, around villages, in and out of farmland, and in and out, through locks, through lakes, through rivers, and it div. Communities as well.

Patrick Radden Keefe (3:57)

Simon Carswell is public affairs editor at the Irish Times and the former US Correspondent for the Irish Times and an old friend of mine. He has been covering Brexit like many journalists in England and Ireland, but doing so from an interesting vantage point.

Simon Carswell (4:14)

My plan for reporting around Brexit was always going to be around the people. It was all about who are the people affected by Brexit and what's it going to mean for them in their daily lives.

Patrick Radden Keefe (4:24)

What Simon has been doing is traveling around the border in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland and talking to regular people and trying to find out how the changes that may come with Brexit will affect their lives.

Simon Carswell (4:37)

When it comes to Brexit, Brexit is all about change. And the place that was going to be changed most is along the only land border with the United Kingdom, and that's in Ireland.

Patrick Radden Keefe (4:48)

Let's go back to your childhood. Where did you grow up?

Simon Carswell (4:54)

I grew up in a number of different places. We moved around quite a bit. I grew up. I actually spent the first two years of my life in Dublin before we moved to Virginia, in County Cavan, not far from the border. And I lived there till I was seven.

Patrick Radden Keefe (5:06)

Always in the Republic, always in the Republic.

Simon Carswell (5:09)

But my parents were from Belfast, so we would have experience of crossing the border several times a year to go see my grandmother in Northern Ireland and see my relatives and tell me about that.

Patrick Radden Keefe (5:18)

What was the border like back then?

Simon Carswell (5:20)

During the Troubles, my earliest memories of the border was we would cross at the main road from Dublin to Belfast near Newry. For a long period of time, it was a customs border where your car might be stopped. So my memory of crossing was late at night. Often we would cross going up there for a long weekend and it was dark really kind of quite eerie when you would, when you would cross the border and you'd see in the shadows at the edge of the road you'd see soldiers, British army soldiers, crouched down, holding guns and making sure that all of the traffic coming through, there's no threat there and really just primed for action really, in case something happened.

Patrick Radden Keefe (6:01)

So then 1998 you get the Good Friday Agreement which is this landmark peace deal which ends this grinding three decade war really, for the sake of contrast. Tell me about crossing the border today.

Simon Carswell (6:18)

Well, crossing the border today, you wouldn't even know you've crossed a border. What's very clear when you go and visit these communities is they don't actually, they don't think there's a border there at all because for the past 20 odd years it's been invisible. So they go about their business crossing this border over and back again over the course of the day. And on many occasions when you talk to people, they don't know how many times they cross the border in a day.

Patrick Radden Keefe (6:40)

They may, because they're not even thinking about it.

Simon Carswell (6:42)

No, they're not even thinking about it. There are no signs there, there's nobody stopping you. So really it makes no difference to them at all because there is, to all intents and purposes, this invisible border.

Patrick Radden Keefe (6:51)

I want to play a clip actually of some school kids that you visited with in a town called Cross Maglen, which is just off the border in Northern Ireland and had been a real flashpoint during the Troubles.

School Child (7:02)

So one half of my house is on the Republic of Ireland and the other side of my house is on Northern Ireland.

Simon Carswell (7:09)

Which part of the island do you sleep on?

School Child (7:11)

I live in, I sleep in Northern Ireland, but my like living room would be in the Republic of Ireland.

Patrick Radden Keefe (7:18)

Can you just tell me a bit about this school and that conversation, how you came to meet those kids and how they're thinking about all this.

Simon Carswell (7:25)

I went to St. Patrick's Catholic Primary School or elementary school in Cross MacLenn, which is about three kilometres across the border in South Armand, Northern Ireland. This was a school that was frequently caught in the crossfire, literally caught in the crossfire where in an IRA attack on the very famous British army barracks in Cross Maclean, right in the town. So the ira, an IRA unit would open fire on the barracks. The soldiers, British soldiers would fire back and this school was caught in the crossfire and the principal of the school pointed out various bricks in the wall of the school that faced the barracks. And he pointed out those are the bricks that needed to be replaced as a result of bullets striking the wall during their gunfights. So the kids all had these stories where they had aunts or uncles or their parents that they had crouched under tables when bullets were coming across and hitting the school. And they were very fearful that this is what Brexit might lead to.

School Child (8:16)

My mommy, she went to Earth school when she was younger and she told me that when she was there she had to go on the table and she saw a bullet fly across and it went through the two windows.

Patrick Radden Keefe (8:27)

So these are children who've grown up after the Good Friday agreement. Their whole lives have happened during peacetime. But it sounds like they're very aware of the fragility of that peace.

Simon Carswell (8:39)

They're extremely aware of it. They're aware, while they didn't live through it, through the stories that their families have told, that this was a bad time and that they don't want to return to it.

Patrick Radden Keefe (8:51)

And you also went out and spoke with truck drivers who actually do crisscross the border every day, bringing goods back and forth.

Truck Driver (8:59)

There's thousands of people going to and from work every day. You know, crossing the border, the hard border, you know, it just isn't going to work. You have to get the air work. You know, it's one small country. I don't even think the politicians know that much. You know, judging by what's being said and what's being told, nobody really knows what's going to happen until it happens. And that's the scariest thing of it all. Not even the people in charge know. So how the hell can we.

Simon Carswell (9:29)

I took for example the busiest crossing over the border, the Dublin Belfast Road, the A1. This is the four lane highway that crosses the border. And I just as an exercise, I looked at the traffic over the course of one 24 hour period. And in that time you had about 25,000 vehicles crossing over that day, 18,000 cars, but crucially you had 6,600 goods vehicles. Now if you put up any kind of check, that's going to mean your goods are not going to get to the supermarkets as quickly as they should. That will result in issues around availability. So you'd have certain products wouldn't have the same shelf life. And so what that will mean is ultimately people are going to have to pay more for their food because of these additional costs.

Patrick Radden Keefe (10:12)

I want to play another clip. This is a woman named Mary Casey, who you Spoke with and her father was actually killed in a bombing of a Customs Point in 1972.

Mary Casey (10:24)

He was doing the run that morning for somebody that was going to a wedding. And he went in to get his book stamped in the customs and they were on the way out when they met the IRA coming in with the bomb.

Simon Carswell (10:39)

Well, I was looking in particular at the operation of customs posts along the border and I thought, well, what was the worst attack, the deadliest attack on a Northern Irish border customs post during the Troubles. And there were quite a few, I think there's about 480 odd incidents over the 30 year period of the Troubles. And I found came across this extraordinary story of this bomb attack on the Newry customs house. And what happened was a team of three IRA men walked into the customs. Ordinarily they would go in, they would shout something, shout a warning and they would leave the bomb and they would all leave and the bomb would explode and destroy the customs house. On that occasion the bomb detonated prematurely and it killed nine people. It killed the three IRA bombers, it killed two lorry drivers who were getting their papers stamped as they were bringing goods across the border and it killed four customs officials. It was a horrendous attack.

Patrick Radden Keefe (11:32)

Well, and you feel as though, I mean you can hear it when Mary Casey talks to you, that there is this tragedy that she's had to carry around, but that it's not just a tragedy, right, it's, it's a warning. And she feels as though people aren't listening to what the consequences might be.

Mary Casey (11:50)

I don't think any of the politicians have any idea what the bother's about really, unless it happens at your doorstep. Nobody knows, nobody understands, you know, what it's about. Somebody goes out to work that morning and they come back in a plastic bag.

Simon Carswell (12:14)

A lot of the Conservative politicians, they don't know how it exists currently. You would have what locals in Northern Ireland along the border would call the one day wonders, these trips by politicians from the UK where they take a visit to the border. But they don't spend any real amount of time seeing how their lives work with this invisible border, how it exists now. And indeed, Boris Johnson, the current British Prime Minister hasn't visited the border to see how it would affect at all. Certainly not in his time, in recent times, since the Brexit referendum. So that sense of frustration that people along the border feel is that the British politicians just don't get it because they don't really understand how it exists now and what the Good Friday agreement and being a member of the European Union has meant and how much easier it has made life along the Irish border.

Patrick Radden Keefe (13:08)

And tell me, Simon, I mean, there's been a great deal of talk over the last couple of years since it became clear that the Irish border would potentially be such a sticking point for Brexit, about a return of violence. You know, either in the extreme case, a return of something that looks like the Troubles, or at least something more marginal around the border. How justified are those fears?

Simon Carswell (13:34)

I think they are justified in the sense that there is a concern that if you do put up any kind of physical infrastructure, it would be regarded as a target because of all of the political baggage that would come with having any kind of sign of partition on the island. Again, I spoke to some former IRA men, and these are veterans of the Troubles, and their view was they think it's overplayed. Actually, it was interesting to hear from them. But there are others who say, well, it's not the. The old veterans of the Troubles that we need to worry about. It's the younger people. It's these new paramilitary groups that are springing up the new IRA and various dissident republican groups along the border and how they might react. And there have been some very explicit warnings by those groups. If there are any kind of checks or any kind of posts put up along the border, then we will target them. And the police service in Northern Ireland have issued a similar warning, and they've gone so far as to say, well, we won't police them if they are put up.

Patrick Radden Keefe (14:28)

So the police have actually said that in Northern Ireland?

Simon Carswell (14:30)

Yes, they've made warning that if these.

Patrick Radden Keefe (14:32)

Installations did go up, they wouldn't police them.

Simon Carswell (14:35)

They have made that warning that if there are installations going up along the border, then they would not police them. They see them as a threat from.

Patrick Radden Keefe (14:42)

Republican groups who would please them.

Simon Carswell (14:44)

Well, this is the challenge that would come from the practicalities of enforcing a customs border. And I think it's one of the reasons why Boris Johnson has decided to come up with his Plan B, which has agreements from the European Union. This new plan is to push the border, both the customs border and the regulatory border, into the Irish Sea. And what that means is having Czechs at the ports of Northern Ireland and the ports of England and Scotland.

Patrick Radden Keefe (15:12)

But if you do what Johnson's proposing and instead shift the border off the island, isn't there a danger that loyalist groups, people in Northern Ireland who are loyal to the British crown, will feel this is kind of a de facto reunification of Ireland, which they would resist.

Simon Carswell (15:27)

And this is exactly what's happening. There have been warnings from the police service in Northern Ireland that there could be unrest amongst loyalists because of this solution. Those people would think that, well, you're potentially undermining Northern Ireland's place in the Union, in the United Kingdom. And what you've seen, actually, from a very kind of practical point of view, is that anyone born in Northern Ireland can apply for an Irish passport. And you have seen a flood of applications from Northern Ireland from people who are looking to take out Irish citizenship because it gives them EU citizenship. And what they're arguing is some pockets of loyalism are arguing that this is a precursor to united Ireland. This would create, as you say, de facto economic united Ireland, and they're unhappy about that. They see this as a slippery slope to united Ireland.

Patrick Radden Keefe (16:18)

And when it comes to this notion of the reunification of Ireland, potentially, the Good Friday Agreement created a mechanism, what they call the consent mechanism, where eventually, if there is at some point a referendum and a majority of people vote to reunify, then that will have to happen. It's a fear, as you said, of Unionists, that this might happen. But it also seems to be something that at least some Irish Republicans have regarded as an opportunity, that Brexit, by forcing people in Northern Ireland to choose between being part of the EU and the uk, might actually create circumstances in which you could see a referendum at some point. So do you think there could be a referendum at some point in the next decade?

Simon Carswell (17:02)

I think there would be huge pressure to avoid that referendum because it's a very tricky political conundrum to put to the people. And I also think that while many people in the Republic of Ireland would be quite keen and see, have a hope that there will be united Ireland in their lifetime, I think it would bring forward some very difficult conversations. There are a million people on the island of Ireland who are Protestant and regard themselves as Unionist and British and want to retain that link with the Union and in the United Kingdom. So I think everyone feels, would feel maybe the exception of Sinn Fein would feel that this is the right time. They're indeed calling for a border poll. They'd want to see it happen. But I think others would probably feel, well, this needs to be a bit more measured. It cannot. This debate cannot take place in the kind of frenetic, frenzied debate around Brexit. We need to have. This is a conversation for another day and shouldn't be forced through because of Brexit.

Patrick Radden Keefe (18:02)

Well, I suppose if there's one thing We've learned from Brexit, it's that it's one thing to have a referendum, it's another thing to work out the details of what it would actually look like.

Simon Carswell (18:11)

Well, this is it. And when the question was asked, do you want to leave the European Union in 2016 in the UK, I don't think people really knew what that meant. Like, what is Brexit? What does Brexit mean? That's what this whole three and a half year process of leaving the European Union for the UK has been so complex. They don't know what it means. They don't know what kind of Brexit they want. They don't know whether they want a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit or a Brexit in name only. And that's why this process has been so tricky.

Patrick Radden Keefe (18:38)

Simon, thanks so much for talking to us and for your amazing reporting.

Simon Carswell (18:41)

Thank you very much.

David Remnick (18:52)

Simon Carswell is the public affairs editor for the Irish Times, a daily paper based in Dublin. And Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of say Nothing and other books. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Narrator/Host (19:18)

The very first book by Carmen Maria Machado was a finalist for the National Book Award. It's a collection of short stories that are not fantasy exactly, but maybe kind of fantasy adjacent. Her new memoir, in the Dream House, was just published and it's getting some rave reviews. Machado lives in Philadelphia. Last year, she took us on a short trip back home to Allentown, Pennsylvania to visit one of her favorite childhood haunts.

Carmen Maria Machado (19:46)

We are at the Allentown Farmers Market, which is on the Allentown fairgrounds. That building over there at the end of the parking lot is where I was born. Not like the farmer's market. That would be amazing. But no, I was born in that hospital. Let's go inside. It smells so good in here. It looks exactly as I remember it. These signs are so old. I just sort of distinctly remember my mother bringing me here. And I guess it sort of triggered this, like, lifelong love of markets, like indoor markets. It's weird because it's like there's a highest ceiling, but then the individual little shops have their own mini ceilings or mini roofs. Each little one has its own little sign. Chicken pies made fresh, o' Brien's fresh bread, salads. You guys need anything else today? I'm very particular. My great grandmother and my grandmother are Austrian and they're very. Just so very fussy. My Omama, God bless her, she would, like, refold napkins for use later. And everything just had its place. And everything was very just so. And I am that way, for better or for worse. Good morning.

Simon Carswell (21:09)

What a beautiful day.

Carmen Maria Machado (21:11)

Oh, my goodness. What a beautiful day.

Simon Carswell (21:13)

I'd like to tell you about a.

Carmen Maria Machado (21:14)

Bunch of great specials going on around dilly beans. Okay. That's what we want. They're like pickled green beans, and they're amazing. Okay. Hi. Can I please have a raspberry bear claw? He's pushing my cheese Danish. Well, these look beautiful. Anything else? I know.

Simon Carswell (21:39)

175.

Carmen Maria Machado (21:43)

Oh, my God. You know what that tastes like? Church. I've always sort of taken pleasure in, like, the specific aesthetic experiences of places like this. Like, I'm really interested in sensory details. And I think that people who have read my work or become familiar with my work are like, yes, like, sentences and details are, like, so specific. And that's not artificial. It's like, I go in and I'm like, I must make this detail pop. But rather, the way that I perceive the world is this very, like, these heightened sort of aesthetic beats or pulses. I don't know if it's like, you can trace it back to here or just like, this was the first time in my life that I can remember having that really strong aesthetic reaction to a place. My guess is, if you were to, like, strap, like, sensors to me, I would react to a place like this the way I would react to dogs. It's like I'm just flooded with serotonin, and I feel like when I'm in here, like, I'm like, oh, this is so nice. So it's this, like, very weird combination of, like, stimulation and relaxation. Maybe this is, like, my church. I'm not religious anymore, but I do. I'm like, maybe this is how church felt. I don't remember. It's been a long time. But there's something about this space that, yeah, just makes me feel just content. Like, I don't believe in heaven, but if I did believe in heaven, I bet it'd be like a giant farmer's market where you have infinite money and you're always a little hungry, but, like, not too hungry. And there's lots of pickle stands. That's what I think.

David Remnick (23:39)

Carmen Maria Machado at the Allentown Farmers Market. Her new memoir is called in the Dream House. You can find some of Machado's essays@newyorker.com I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for joining me today, and I hope you'll join me next time for the New Yorker Radio Hour. Have a great week.

Producer/Closing Credits (24:04)

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Karen Frillman, Kalalea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses and Steven Valentino, with help from Allison McAdam, Meng Fei Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.