‘Jacob Rees-Mogg you’re right. You don’t need to visit the border… you need to have lived here.’ Belfast-born actor Stephen Rea explores the real impact of Brexit and the uncertainty of the future of the Irish border in a short film written by Clare Dwyer Hogg.
Jacob reese mogg you’re right you don’t need to visit the north of ireland to understand the border you need to have lived here when the border was no man’s land neither your land or my land a ragged stretch of spike and because you do not like to think it’s a problem does not mean it vanishes a trick of the eye a trump lie just because you have said the problem
Is imaginary does not disappear the thread of reality i used to assume that magical thinking meant wide eyes a vision that doesn’t stop with the sky create a view on old to make it new but no sure someone from the eu accused westminster of magical thinking no assumptions anymore about what magic is there’s a lot of chat about imagination when people talk of
The border the irish one you know between the northern part and the southern part and what keeps them apart stone or moss hard or soft you hear these things through airwaves and screen and wonder what they mean boris johnson took a notion that our border was just like his donegal derry camden and islington what’s the difference i won’t break down the distance
There between reality and creative thinking magical thinking an imaginary problem a pragmatic extension of a reality that already exists the magic formula of words has yet to materialize now there’s a collection of words fished from a misty view of what connects me and you they’re not pagan hopes just quotes politicians struggling to grasp the ungrabbable we’re
Knee-deep in philosophy here trapped in other people’s boundaries yet to me it feels quite real roads that start here and then there somehow allowing a wound to heal it’s counterintuitive that nothing to see now is more real than what there was then nothing to see means reality sounds magical doesn’t it this is what magic in the day-to-day looks like the spirit
Of peace in the normality nothing outward as such no extra levity just a gentleness in the mundanity daily travel across political lines work school grocery shops back again magic is the absence sometimes and there was magic too in 1998 a very good friday and all the years in between to make the border disappear there but not there a line of imagination that
Needed imagination to make it exist while on scene and war that vulture who makes human lives carrion tears the beauty of identity to pieces feasts on death cares not about any cause it shrieked and screamed as its roosting places were turned into wider spaces nobody ever thought that dismantling the barricades like a jigsaw bit by bit was a temporary measure
We thought the concrete was broken down old wood burnt weapons beat into plows we hoped by digging out old roots the grass would grow over lines drawn in war rooms and even though we would all know when we drove from one political sphere to the next we would know what the earth would not and so maybe the stale tight air around the sight of fear and death and
Human plight would burst instead allowing a flowing a growing with time none of us expected this would be swift that overnight tensions would lift no we’re not the types to put faith in magicians but we’ll want to believe in magic and this was a start beginning something a road with no blocks clear paths we didn’t think it was illusion that pieces of the jigsaw
Falling away before our eyes didn’t stop existing after all instead packed away in boxes labeled and ordered for use at a future time ready for reconstruction down the line were the decisions on that day sacred for both sides of the divide or just things that made the process move ahead for them apparently there hasn’t been a hard border here since 1923 you’d
Have known that wasn’t true toby young if you’d been here to see and no i wasn’t alive either when lloyd george called ireland the irish question that was 1916. it’s strange that now it seems the people in power and the people who write about us are calling it that again we’ve got questions but now we’re the irish question isn’t identity something to do with
Magic the mystery of birth what we cleave to in life another imagination given credence by ritual grows from the soil planted in the earth rooted in how we see where are the stereotypes here when some of us have irish passports some british some of both overreaching arlene foster said about the words and documents that will determine what and when but does
Anything happen then unless you reach beyond two kingdoms bound by imaginations that’s why the language woven through negotiations has a mystical threat those at the head cannot help themselves but use the power of identity infusing and confusing practicality we live here and we’re holding our breath again because we know that chance and hope come in forms like steam and smoke you
Transcribed from video
Brexit: a cry from the Irish border I FT Standpoint By Financial Times