This begins with an account of a trip I am about to take to some of the counties of the province of Ulster in the north of the island of Ireland – Cavan and Donegal in the Republic, and Fermanagh, Derry and Antrim in Northern Ireland.
It is a few months before the latest date – 31 October – for Britain’s exit from the EU. Recently appointed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in typically intemperate language, has made a ‘do or die’ pledge to uphold Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc on that date, even if it means ‘crashing out’ of the Union without a deal. ‘Do or die. Come what may’. This attitude represents a threat to the current, comparatively open British border in Ireland – the so-called soft or frictionless border that was negotiated through the Good Friday Agreement (10 April 1998), the political culmination of the Northern Ireland peace process in the 1990s. Millions of column inches have been written on the ramifications of a no-deal Brexit that fails to honour the ‘backstop’ that the EU insists on – that is, the guarantee of maintaining a ‘seamless’ border on the island of Ireland. Suffice to say, the potential threat of renewed violence in Ireland bubbles beneath the possibility of renewed physical checks or infrastructure demarcating the line between the Republic and Northern Ireland.
Frontier, boundary, partition, borderline, seamless, porous, frictionless, hard, soft, borderlands, boglands, drumlins, crossroads, marches, limit, bounds, perimeter, divide, red line, blood red line, regulatory alignment, technological solution, backstop, single customs territory, cross-border trade, provision, withdrawal agreement, customs checks, permanent solution, no-deal Brexit, civil peace, civil war. ‘Do or die. Come what may’: This is a time for worrying about borders. Seamus Heaney’s line from his poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’, on the violent birth pangs of the Troubles near the poet’s birthplace in rural County Derry, is apropos here: ‘The “voice of sanity” is getting hoarse.’ (From the 1975 Faber collection North.)
As it happens, my maternal great-grandfather (James Cooney) and paternal great-grandmother (Mary Duncan) were born in neighbouring Ulster counties – Cavan and Fermanagh respectively – both leaving Ireland in the second half of the 19th-century, eventually for New Zealand, before the dividing line between the two counties was imposed. Emigration, immigration, subjects in transition, migratory forces and balances of power that regulate them still temper, insistently, the relations between how bodies of land and people are composed and articulated.
But my methods are not so easily defined – I’m going to wait and see: ‘What for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine my course’ writes Walter Benjamin, of his approach to the Paris Arcades project. Adorno defined the form of the essay, as practiced by Benjamin, as an ‘unmethodological method’. Deviation, hesitation, delay and detour colour this initial foray into Ulster at this moment in time. I leave on Monday.
Today The Times leaked the government’s classified ‘Yellowhammer’ report on preparations for a no-deal Brexit. This includes the prediction that avoiding the return of a ‘hard border’ in Ireland is unlikely to be sustainable and that ‘protests and direct action with road blockades’ are likely. See responses from Irish politicians in this Irish Times article.
From the ‘Yellowhammer’ report:
Northern Ireland On Day 1 of No Deal, Her Majesty’s government will activate the “no new checks with limited exceptions” model announced on March 13, establishing a legislative framework and essential operations and system on the ground, to avoid an immediate risk of a return to a hard border on the UK side.
The model is likely to prove unsustainable because of economic, legal and biosecurity risks. With the UK becoming a “third [non-EU] country”, the automatic application of EU tariffs and regulatory requirements for goods entering Ireland will severely disrupt trade. The expectation is that some businesses will stop trading or relocate to avoid either paying tariffs that will make them uncompetitive or trading illegally; others will continue to trade but will experience higher costs that may be passed on to consumers. The agri-food sector will be hardest hit, given its reliance on complicated cross-border supply chains and the high tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade.
Disruption to key sectors and job losses are likely to result in protests and direct action with road blockades. Price and other differentials are likely to lead to the growth of the illegitimate economy. This will be particularly severe in border communities where criminal and dissident groups already operate with greater freedom. Given the tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade, there will be pressure to agree new arrangements to supersede the Day 1 model within days or weeks.
See the Irish Times special investigation on Brexit & the border here.
I left EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin with burning eyes and ringing ears. The museum is located in Dublin’s docklands, in the vaults of an industrial building dating back to 1820, initially used as a bonded customs warehouse for tobacco and wine. It now houses a shopping mall. The museum underneath strikes me as a souped-up version of the corridor displays sometimes seen in airports that serve as a taster of the country you are about to enter – generally, exercises in banality. EPIC is dedicated to histories of the Irish diaspora and emigration from Ireland – clearly a fascinating subject. Unfortunately, it primarily consists of soundbytes and rapidly moving, ruthlessly edited film clips: sound and image bleeding and morphing in an infuriating fashion. Throughout the galleries, mawkish and pointless ‘interactivity’ (Guess the Outlaw!) is liberally scattered. It seems to have been designed for people with a concentration span of about three seconds and the ability to read no more than two sentences at a time. A whole room of fake ‘olde worlde’ book spines with titles by authors from Ireland and the Irish diaspora is par for the course.
Bookshelves of fake books with titles of books by authors from Ireland and the Irish diaspora. EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin.
One ‘byte’ that caught me was a snippet of a sentence from the writer Edna O’Brien: ‘There must be something secretly catastrophic about a country from which so many people go, escape…’ Manifestations of this sense of catastrophe is very evident on the streets of Dublin where, around every corner, there is a plaque or monument to fallen heroes, victims, martyrs, to those massacred or starved, impoverished, imprisoned, locked out, removed, shamed or otherwise driven from homes, workplaces or homelands. It is reminiscent of Freud’s image of the unconscious, in Civilization and its Discontents, as a Rome ‘in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones’.
Outside EPIC there is a memorial to the Great Irish Famine (1845- 1849), which commemorates the forced emigration of 1,490 tenants from Strokestown Park estate in Co. Roscommon (now the site of the National Famine Museum) during the summer of 1847. The tenants were forced to walk the 167km route along the Royal Canal to Dublin, where they boarded the open deck of a packet steamer to Liverpool. From there, they travelled on some of the worst of what became known as ‘coffin ships’. One of them was the Naomi, on which 196 out of 421 passengers died on the voyage from Liverpool to Quebec.
A pair of children’s shoes: detail from the Famine Memorial in Custom House Quay, Dublin. Commemorates the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849). Artist: Rowan Gillespie.Children’s shoes found in a famine graveyard near the Erne Hospital in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. On display at the Cavan County Museum, Ballyjamesduff.
Reversing the course of this 1847 eviction, since 2017 a hotel in the remote town of Ballaghaderreen in Co. Roscommon gave asylum to around 334 Syrians fleeing war-stricken homelands (though the contract with the former Abbyfield Hotel expires in December 2019). This accommodation was one of a number of Emergency Reception and Orientation Centres (EROC) across Ireland providing sanctuary during the height of the recent mass migration of people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe.
Latter day ‘coffin ships’, particularly those crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa, are well documented. Since 1993, a group called United for Intercultural Action has been compiling a list of ‘documented deaths of refugees and migrants due to the restrictive policies of “Fortress Europe” ‘ (here), which numbered 36,570 as of 1 April 2019 (though there would be many more undocumented). Earlier this week there were reports of migrants jumping off an overcrowded Spanish rescue ship and trying to swim to Lampedusa. By that stage, the Proactiva Open Arms ship had been refused entry by Italy for over three weeks since far right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has taken a hard line on migration and is attempting to close Lampedusa to migrant rescue ships.
Meanwhile back in the province of Ulster, following the revelations of the leaked ‘Yellowhammer’ report, a suspected bomb was reported near the border of Co. Fermanagh and Co. Cavan close to the Cavan to Clones road. When PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) officers attended the scene, a bomb exploded nearby, leading police to believe that they had been lured to the spot by dissidents attempting to murder PSNI officers. I overheard someone in Cavan say: ‘Any excuse, they’ll come out of the woodwork’. It is a common sentiment amongst borderland locals fearful of renewed sectarian violence if the border is fortified following Brexit. (Undoubtedly, the incident would have brought unpleasant memories to many older locals of the bombing in the border town Belturbet in Co. Cavan on 28 December 1972. Two teenagers, Geraldine O’Reilly (aged 15) and Paddy Stanley (aged 16) lost their lives. Eight others were seriously injured. Both of the youngsters were on Christmas holidays from school. Geraldine was waiting for her order in a local chip shop when the bomb hit. Paddy was calling his parents from a public phone box when he lost his life. Across the border in Co. Monaghan, another bomb had been detonated earlier in the day, seriously injuring two men. A third bomb exploded outside a pub at Mullnagoad, near Pettigo, in Co. Donegal. Nobody claimed responsibility for the Belturbet attack, but it was thought to be the work of loyalist paramilitaries.)
These are just two recent examples that suggest how ‘border thinking’ (Walter Mignolo) tempers the way the contemporary world is perceived, performed and produced. The complex interplay between borders, as well as frontiers like the Mediterranean, represent multiple ranges of register: bridge – dividing line, porous – watertight, soft – hard, unauthorised – authorised, invisible – visible, no-man’s land – demarcation zone, etc. Rather than being marginal, borders are increasingly key nodes for understanding the contemporary political landscape. According to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their book Border as Method, ‘borders play a key role in the production of the heterogeneous time and space for contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism’.
For some years, I have been thinking about how concepts linked to hospitality may be a useful way of thinking through such negotiable and contested spaces. The point of departure was Jacques Derrida’s political analyses, in a sequence of seminars from the late 1990s,[1] in which he reads ‘hospitality’ as an aporetic space between the principles of unconditional or absolute hospitality – the principle of allowing whomever or whatever enters one’s domain without reservations or calculations – and conditional hospitality – the laws required to control and protect ‘home.’ Rather than setting these principles of hospitality as mutually exclusive forces, Derrida argues for an irreducible relation between the two.
Derrida understood ‘hospitality’ as an interrogative term to consider both public space as a bounded zone, in which the stranger/foreigner (étranger) is subject to the codes, rules and regulations of its host (home, city or state), and the common right of any stranger to any space; that is, the ethical imperative that the host receives whatever and whomever enters its domain. The radical basis of Derrida’s interpretation calls for the hyperbolic, unlimited ethics of (unconditional) hospitality to orient the (conditional) realm of legislation operating between hosts and guests, challenging the more conventional situation in which the unconditional is contained or guarded by the precepts of conditional hospitality. Radically re-orienting the conditional identity of hospitality, which Derrida summarises as the requirements for ‘a police inquisition, a registration of information, or a straightforward frontier control,’ invokes threshold politics as an ‘unstable place of strategy and decision.’ This, Derrida writes, is ‘[a] difference both subtle and fundamental, a question that arises on the threshold of “home,” and on the threshold between two inflections.’ For Derrida, this is an absolute principle: ‘An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire ethics is decided by it.’[2]
[1] Key publications related to this topic include: Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Adieu to Emmanual Levinas, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999); On Cosmopolitanism and Foregiveness, trans. by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000).
[2] Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Hospitality,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 66-7.
Richard Wentworth, Glad That Things Don’t Talk (1982). Zinc, rubber, cable, lead. 34 x 68 x 33 cm. IMMA Collection: Loan, Weltkunst Foundation, 1994.
I was drawn to this small work called Glad That Things Don’t Talk (1982) by English artist Richard Wentworth, on loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). It is typical of his whimsical found or fabricated constructions but was also quite specific to my situation at the time since, after trudging in the rain from the Hugh Lane Gallery to see Francis Bacon’s reconstructed studio, to EPIC and then on to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells followed by the long stretch to IMMA, I rather fancied the thought of galoshes, bearing in mind that my trousers were wet to the knees. I also identified with the lead ball attached to the back of the overshoes since, at the time, I felt like one of those old dogs who sit down on the pavement in the middle of a walk and refuse to move.
While I was in Dublin, it had either just stopped raining, was raining, or was about to rain. After I got to Cavan, the next two days hovered between teeming and torrential. On the Friday, the weather report on the radio promised a ‘heatwave’ for the next few days. The radio announcer interjected wryly: ‘Sure, it’ll be an Irish sort of a heatwave: a damp one, in other words’. We are in the boglands, so expect a bog. By midday, though the temperature was only around 21 degrees, locals were sweating buckets and mopping their brows ostentatiously. I suspect they were hoping for the return of the rain.
In his account of a trip to Ireland in the mid-1950s (Irish Journal: A Traveller’s Portrait of Ireland), Heinrich Böll writes that ‘The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather’. Rain also features heavily in Colm Tóibín’s account of his walk along the border in the 1980s, at the height of the Troubles. An old fellow he meets along the way rather gleefully welcomes the onset of rain since it signals the promise of a warm pub: ‘Nothing for it but the high chair!’ On another occasion, Tóibín is feeling creeped out on a lonely lane near Kiltyclogher when he sees a man coming towards him ‘in a way which was deliberate and ominous. I considered turning back. I stared straight at him as he came close. “It rains oftentimes,” he said, as he passed me by.’
