'Collateral to someone else's national story': A view from Northern Ireland on the Brexit saga

For more than three years of tedious and overwrought debates, negotiations and missed deadlines, it seemed at times that Brexit might be permanently thwarted. But as of 11 p.m. local London time on Jan. 31, Britain's long drawn-out divorce from the European Union finally happened.

It's taken a painfully long, confusing and graceless dance to get here. But the Brexit saga still isn't over. For the next 11 months, the United Kingdom will be in a transition period, while it negotiates its future economic relationship with Europe. 

And the scars left behind by the Brexit debacle — a crisis that left British society deeply fractured and embittered — will take years to heal.

In Northern Ireland, where the vote was overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the EU, Brexit has reignited old resentments towards Britain and a deep sense of betrayal.

"I think a major [feeling] felt by everybody … in Northern Ireland is that we're sort of collateral to someone else's national story — the people of England, most specifically," Garrett Carr told Michael Enright of The Sunday Edition.

Carr is a mapmaker and writer who traveled the entirety of the Irish border — almost 500 kilometres long — by foot and canoe. He chronicled those travels in his book, The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland's Border.

The question of the Irish border was a perpetual stumbling block during the Brexit debates. It ripped open long-standing grievances, and has threatened to unravel a delicately balanced peace agreement.

"I grew up quite close to the border and in my childhood it was a hard border," Carr said. "Then in '93 we joined the single market and that covered the customs. And in '98 there was the peace accord, the Good Friday Agreement; and that got rid of military checkpoints. So then it became this open place."

"With Boris Johnson's deal, the future for Northern Ireland, it seems, is to be in a kind of all-Ireland economic unit tied in with the EU … to try and avoid the hard border returning. But with customs checks on the frontier, the border ceases to be invisible and is once again a kind of a process that people have to go through."

Carr, who is a lecturer in creative writing at Queen's University in Belfast, added that Brexit has been "an emotional business" for people in Northern Ireland, but that impact was not considered by most people in England who voted for Brexit.

The push behind Brexit was really English nationalism, not British or U.K. nationalism, he said.

"And when Northern Ireland made it difficult for the U.K. to extrapolate itself from the EU, then what we see of Boris Johnson's deal is that they're prepared, willing and probably fairly happy to simply leave it behind."

Carr added that even though Brexit has finally been enacted, there is much that remains unresolved.

"We've managed to move to the next stage, but no matter what Boris Johnson says, people on the ground in Northern Ireland are aware that it is not actually over and done with," he said.

"I think what people in Northern Ireland know, especially on the border, is that actually it never has to really be resolved. Places can always sort of hover in this sort of insecure status and they can just stay there for years."

"The border really … has always sort of been like that. It's always seemed a bit conflicted. It's always been contested … It's always existed in that rather sort of foggy space," Carr said. "So people in Northern Ireland kind of know that Brexit could be like that as well; that you won't quite ever land and that's 'Brexit Done.'"

Click 'listen' above to hear the full interview.