English Audio Request

The two neighboring towns of Strabane and Lifford look pretty ordinary. They both have a bar, red brick houses, a church, a main street, and another bar, and another bar.
But there is one thing that makes these towns very special: their residents will probably experience something that hardly ever happens, thanks to Brexit -- the reappearance of a border that was thought to be almost obsolete.
And it's not just any border, but the Irish border, once one of the most controversial in Europe. It currently bridges two tightly knit regions. I've come here to find out how that may change.

I'm actually standing on the border as we speak. Right there behind me, that's the Republic of Ireland. And if we just go a little bit like this, that over there? That's Northern Ireland, so the UK.

Lifford and Strabane are twin towns on opposite sides of the border, connected by one bridge. The border between the two islands stretches over 500 kilometers and is one of the most difficult issues in the Brexit negotiations. The UK wants out of the EU, but that will require a harder border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

And what's being decided in Westminster has real-life consequences for people who live right on the border.

And that's even though residents here voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU.

Right now, the border doesn't really feel like one. People cross it to commute, to shop, or even just to jog.

The only differing thing are the street signs. Here in the UK, they're in miles per hour, and in Ireland it's kilometers - as it should be.
And in Ireland you pay in Euros, in the UK in pounds. But it wasn't always like this -- up until 1998 goods and people couldn't travel freely because of a militarized border and a lack of customs agreements.

The distance between the British customs and the Irish customs was less than a mile, so it could take maybe a couple hours just to go that couple of miles. It was just a nightmare of a journey.

Kieran Kennedy has been working for the sportswear company O'Neill's for 40 years now. The company is one of the biggest employers in the region and is located in Strabane in the UK, right at the border. It also has plants in the Republic of Ireland. Its products move back and forth across the border up to eight times before being shipped out. And half the staff here crosses the border to come to work.

At the time the border opened you know our company really took off. Now if we were subject to tariffs or duties, you know it could spell an end for a company like ours. As a plan B, O'Neil's has bought land on the other side of the border, so as to move the plant back to an EU country if worst came to worst. And other firms are affected too -- about 35% of Northern Irish exports currently go to the Republic of Ireland.

The most surprising thing is that nobody has any idea what the border could actually look like. Neither private citizens nor business owners not even the politicians.

Physical border posts? Automated license plate recognition? No one knows!

That uncertainty is weighing on the people who live here.

To have gone from a past where we had borders, this makes a big difference to think that that could come back. Just normal people are asking normal questions, like what about my pension? Simple things that there isn't really answers to.

Orla Ward lives in the Republic of Ireland, 20 kilometres from the UK. She commutes across the border every day, as do many here, but the border isn't only an economic one. It's very politically charged too.

This place is called the camel's hump. It used to be the British customs checkpoint. It was also the site of two shootings during the period known as The Troubles. That was the name given to the conflict in Northern Ireland and along the border, between the Unionists, who wanted to belong to the United Kingdom, and the Nationalists, who wanted a united Ireland without a border. It started in the late 1960s and only ended in 1998 with a peace agreement. More than 3,000 people died, half of them civilians.

We would have had helicopters of police and military, you know, flying very very low. You may have heard some gunshots or things like that happening as well, so you knew that, you know, there was something going on.

Ciaran Gallagher's family was deeply involved in the conflict.

When we seen, maybe, police land rovers coming up, and things like that, you know, we would have came down here and got ourselves prepared. You know either to join a riot or begin a riot.

We grew up with a lot of sectarian violence and that's one thing I think that we fear, that may come back again, with a hard border here. I wouldn't like to have my children, you know, go through what I went through.

The border here is much more complex than I thought it would be. It's not only that goods and people may have a harder time traveling across the border. It's also what the border does to the people's mindsets. The uncertainty is one thing, but most of the people I talk to think that any kind of harder border would be a step back into history -- and not a good history at that!