If you have heard of the Border, then you must know that there is no Border.  People who believe in the Border believe in something that they know does not exist. Those who believe in the Border have been allowed to indulge in a fancy with grotesque consequences for what we might loosely call the real word. We are all affected when we must act like a Border has grown in a place where it never was; our thinking is blocked, we find that the Border that is said to lie across the land—through fields, rivers, houses, through bodies as they cross it—has a monstrous Double that also Crosses the Mind, you could say that it cuts straight through the head, splits the tongue; no matter the distance from it, it gets inside: try to speak of our country and you feel it ramming through you. Let it be taken for granted that this state is bad for the one living, the one trying to think or speak; that the work involved in maintaining the irrational assertion that something exists that does not is a kind of violence in itself.

Some mornings the present writer cannot believe that Northern Ireland exists, and he—though you may call him she or by any other gender if you, the reader, so wish—is not even from that part of the country. What must it be like to live in a place that is not there? Of course one recognises that it exists in Practice, but we all know that it does not exist in Theory. You might imagine that practice requires theoretical support. This has so far been proven untrue. This split in the relation between practice and theory is galling: it is as if a ball has been thrown in the air and we wait for it to drop because we accept the operations of gravity, and yet we see that it does not. How long can Northern Ireland keep going without existing in theory? A century by now. When will we see the Drop?  

Let us admit that the State to which the north-east of Ireland is grafted, the United Kingdom, is itself a zombie thing. It stumbled out of the 1914-18 war a winner, and kept on walking. A few years later most of Ireland got free of it and the insistent humour of its name—that adjective, United (although the noun Kingdom is funny enough)—was proven to be worse than a joke: a lie. There was no Unity to this Kingdom obviously made up of bits—not just the four larger entities, but various islands and distant domains of deliberately uncertain status—no Unity before the War of Independence and none after, and yet they kept the name, a descriptor that was already known to have failed in its function of forcing Unity into being merely by naming the country as such: the sad bandage being the insertion of the word Northern before Ireland. People now whisper of the break-up of the UK: it broke one hundred years ago.  

David Trimble referred to the “natural Irish land border”, as if a river, at least, or a chasm of some kind, runs along the line that colonists decided on overnight, abandoning, incidentally, their brothers and sisters, whom it would not have suited them to include, in the other counties of Ulster. In Trimble’s account, Partition has been removed from the human world, rational or otherwise, and has been placed in the zone of the arational, ahistorical; the Border is not only a historical phenomenon, but a geological or physical or even biological given. Let us beware of claims to Nature. Nature, surely, abhors a Border. 

It is easy to see how the Border is projected not only onto an unbroken landscape, but also into the past: we read Colm Tóibín in the LRB, which should have known better, saying that “Roger Casement […] was brought up mainly in Northern Ireland”. Brought up in a statelet not forced into being until decades into the Future!

Logging off his work computer one day, Macdara was pleased to see a dramatic image of the Giant’s Causeway. He was less pleased to see Microsoft’s description of a giant who built a causeway from Northern Ireland to Scotland. In this case the Border is projected not onto the past exactly, but into myth: wherever Ireland is, it has always already been split, desecrated, as if colonisation must work backwards in time as well as forwards, the better to justify itself and lay the foundations for its arrival to accomplish its own now inevitable aims.