Borders and Partition with guest Sinéad Moynihan

Not only has Professor Sinéad Moynihan not appeared in Hollyoaks, but she has also not appeared in Drop Dead Gorgeous or How Not to Live Your Life.

Find out more about the Partition of Ireland, the  Good Friday Agreement, the Common Travel Area, and Ireland’s 2004 Citizenship referendum. Stephen O’Neill’s book is Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955. You can read about US Immigration pre-clearance here: Gillian notes that, much later than 1903, she travelled from Victoria BC to Washington state via pre-clearance.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali…

Gillian Roberts: and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands from different countries with multiple passports.

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk, where we today have an amazing special guest, along with the usual two suspects, as you know. Hi, Gillian.

Gillian Roberts: Hi, Zalfa.

Zalfa Feghali: And hi, Sinéad.

Sinéad Moynihan: Hi, both.

Zalfa Feghali: We’re here talking with Sinéad today about borders and partition, but before we get into it, we might as well introduce her. So Sinéad Moynihan is a Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. After studying English and French at the National University of Ireland in Galway and an MA in English at University College Cork, she undertook her PhD and then a Leverhulme Trust-funded postdoc at the University of Nottingham in the School of American and Canadian Studies, where we both met her. Her first book, based on her PhD, was Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing–that was in 2010. Her second book, the outcome of her postdoc, was “Other People’s Diasporas”: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture”--that was in 2013. Her third book, Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The “Returned Yank” in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to present, came out in 2019 and won the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture, awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies. 

Gillian Roberts: Sinéad was Principal Investigator of the Brian Moore at 100 Project, funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, which works to revive scholarly and public interest in Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore in his centenary year, 2021. Her current project, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, is her fourth monograph, For Export Only, Irish Writers and U.S. Magazines, 1940-1975. Among other objectives, it aims to dislodge exile and emigration as the dominant modes of framing Irish literary culture that is produced and or circulated beyond the borders of the nation-state. Fun fact: Sinéad has not appeared in Hollyoaks, despite reports to the contrary.

Zalfa Feghali: She is shaking her head right now, as if we should have known it. 

Sinéad Moynihan: I'm open to offers.

Zalfa Feghali: I mean, I had no idea you had not appeared in Hollyoaks, Sinéad, so there we are.

Sinéad Moynihan: This could be the start of a wonderful new acting career for me. 

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. 

Sinéad Moynihan: I mean, is Hollyoaks even still a thing? 

Gillian Roberts: I think you'd probably have to star in a film project to revive it. Thanks so much for joining us on what won't be the hottest day of the year in the UK, but is certainly on its way to being the hottest day of the year, and to talk to us about partition in relation to borders. Now, a lot of your work has focused on migration and narratives of migration and figures like the returned migrant, the returned Yank, for instance. And you're also talking, of course, perhaps especially in your current projects, about modes of cultural production and circulation where international borders are implicated. And we wondered if you could tell us a bit about how you see your work, your prior work and your current work, intersecting with questions of border studies.

Sinéad Moynihan: Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for the invitation to do this podcast. It's a lovely opportunity to talk about my research, but it's an even lovelier opportunity to see and hear you both. So thank you. I guess I'll start at the beginning. So I did my PhD, as you said, which became my first book about narratives of passing. And I remember one of the very earliest exercises I did just after arriving in Nottingham to start my PhD, was to write a 3,000 word close analysis of this novel called The House Behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chestnut, which is a novel about racial passing by an African American writer. And what fascinated me about that novel was that one of the characters discovers that he can be white if he migrates from North Carolina to South Carolina. 

Gillian Roberts: Wow. 

Sinéad Moynihan: So even though a lot of people talk about the one-drop rule in relation to US definitions of race and so on, in actual fact, many individual states had much more specific definitions of what constituted whiteness and what constituted Blackness. But of course they weren't consistent. So if you crossed that state border, in this case a neighbouring state, you weren't even passing because you were legally white in the new place. So I was really interested early on in connections between geographical borders and the act of passing and how the obsessive efforts to police racial boundaries were obviously underpinned by an anxiety that such boundaries were ultimately permeable. So that's, I suppose, where my interests started. And then in my subsequent work, as you said, I've been more interested in kind of relationships between Ireland and the US, transatlantic connections. Other People's Diasporas was about the reversal of Ireland's historical migration pattern in the mid-1990s, when Ireland became a country of net in-migration over a sustained period of time. The idea was that Ireland had always exported people, and now it was a country of net in-migration. And I was interested in how the literary and cultural imagination tried to process this very unusual development by thinking through Ireland's own history of migration, which was predominantly one of out-migration. So I suppose the main connection to borders, I know that you talk a lot on this podcast about citizenship, and I suppose one of the personal motivations for that project was the 2004 referendum on Irish citizenship. Prior to that, the Republic of Ireland had jus soli, so birthright citizenship, same as the US. If you're born in Ireland, you're an Irish citizen, and of course that was extended under the Good Friday Agreement to anybody born in Northern Ireland if they so chose to be Irish citizens. But that was overturned in 2004. And the reason for the shift was really because of unprecedented in-migration by migrants of colour and an effort to police and restrict who could get Irish citizenship and to preserve a kind of white nation-state. You know, I talk about that in the book, but that was personally, I think, a big motivating factor for that project. One of the ministers at the time who was pushing that referendum talked a lot about citizenship tourism. 

Gillian Roberts: Wow.

Sinéad Moynihan: You know that migrants were coming because of our unusual birthright citizenship, unusual when compared to the rest of the EU, say, that, you knowm people were coming into the country, collecting the Irish passport and of course a backdoor to EU citizenship and were then picking up the passport and the birth certificate and then leaving the country. So that was a term and I was never quite sure whether that was a sort of common term in these debates or if you've encountered it before. 

Gillian Roberts: No–have you, Zalfa?

Zalfa Feghali: It has become more commonplace now in relations to countries like Cyprus, where we should be slightly careful, I would say, where there have been instances in the past that you can fulfill certain conditions that may look like citizenship tourism and then get it. But it's tied up in finances and corporate identities as well. So not really. I think Ireland, like I think the example you're giving, Sinéad, is an earlier iteration of what we now see as a little bit more commonplace. I mean, while you were speaking, my mind went straight back to you, Gillian, thinking about hospitality. What an incredibly inhospitable hospitable thing to do.

Gillian Roberts: That's right. It's like, oh no, you can't be Irish. You're a tourist. I must confess my mind went straight to hospitality as well. Shock. Horror. But also, of course, and I'm sure we'll come back to this, the surge of applications for Irish citizenship in the wake of Brexit. You know, under this new configuration of citizenship.

Sinéad Moynihan: Yeah, well that was the thing about the referendum which was passed by 79% of the electorate, of which I was not one. I was one of the 21% that voted against, is that it preserved the rights of the diaspora. So one grandparent is enough to get you Irish citizenship. So it preserved the bloodline, the jus sanguinis model, but it took away jus soli.

Gillian Roberts: Which might be even more quote-unquote tourist in terms of people maybe not living in Ireland despite that ancestral connection. Really, really interesting dynamic there in terms of that preservation of whiteness.

Zalfa Feghali: Or perceived whiteness, because there is that kind of history of Irishness not necessarily being perceived as white. It's relational, of course.

Gillian Roberts: Yes, absolutely. And part of that involves the diaspora as well, doesn't it? But you're the expert, Sinéad, so we'll stop talking. 

Sinéad Moynihan: So yes, as you said, Gillian, that third book was about the returned Yank, the figure of the returned migrant in the Irish cultural imagination who sort of looms large in the Irish imagination, even though actual return migration has historically been very low. compared with other groups who migrated to the US. And I suppose I was interested in that figure, in terms of borders, I was interested in that figure of the returnee as a sort of a disruptive presence. One that sort of amplifies the idea that you can be Irish, can identify as Irish, but not belong to the nation-state, not live in the nation-state. You know, Benedict Anderson, you know, a nation’s imagined, limited and sovereign, but it isn't limited if you've got an enormous diaspora and lots of people living outside who identify as Irish. One of the things I was interested in was like the juxtaposition of, say, the figure of the returnee who comes back to Ireland to participate in the troubles in Northern Ireland and how the returned Yank amplifies the sort of paradoxical position of the North as well, where there are people who identify as Irish, who have a huge attachment to Ireland, but who do not live in the bounds of a nation-state, which is the Republic of Ireland. So those kinds of things interested me in that book. And then this final book, it's not written yet. This is more, you know, getting into the circulation stuff, you know, the kind of stuff Gillian, you've worked on in the past and the border stuff. I never thought it would be so interesting to read about international tax treaties and copyright law.

Gillian Roberts: That's how they get you! 

Zalfa Feghali: It's the gateway to border studies really, isn't it?

Sinéad Moynihan: Totally. So, you know, when the double taxation treaty came in between Ireland and the US in 1949, how that really changed things for Irish writers who were publishing in the US. So they were previously getting docked, you know, 30% or whatever it was from the earnings in the US and the double taxation treaty changed that. It wasn't always straightforward, because, you know, one writer I'm looking at this writer called Mary Lavan was actually a US citizen. She was born in the US to Irish migrant parents. They moved back to Ireland–they were returned Yanks–when she was a child. And so you have all these letters from agents and publishers and editors going, wait, are you a US citizen or an Irish citizen? Because we need to work out how to tax you. And then the other thing I suppose is copyright, because I'm interested in magazines. What these writers were essentially selling were first North American serial rights. They were free to sell it on to second serial rights in Britain or Ireland or wherever they wanted. But it had to appear, you know, if they sold first North American serial rights, it had to appear first in that location. And sometimes there were issues, there was mix-ups, there was mistakes, there was Irish writers making errors, there was all sorts of stuff that went on. But also the kind of thinking about these jurisdictions, like were you selling world rights, were you selling Britain and Commonwealth, but of course excluding Canada, because they came under the North American, you know, so it was Britain and Commonwealth except Canada. So all that stuff is, you know, I now find very interesting.

Gillian Roberts: I think my proudest moment as an educator was during my postdoc when I was working on my Canada-US border monograph and I was talking a lot about free trade and one of my teaching evaluations, I had plenty of not so good teaching evaluations, but one of them said, ‘Gillian makes things that are boring interesting’ and I knew they were talking about free trade. 

Sinéad Moynihan: I mean, that is the highest compliment. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, I'll take that. I'll ride that out for the rest of my career, because I find all that stuff really fascinating as well in cultural production, because sometimes, you know, it becomes really visible in the work and in interesting ways, that sort of tension that's being negotiated at the political and economic level. You mentioned people in Northern Ireland feeling an attachment to the Republic of Ireland despite living on the other side of the border. And you grew up in the Republic of Ireland. I just wondered when you were growing up, how much of an awareness did you have of issues surrounding Northern Ireland, the history of partition, the ways in which that was resonating culturally?

Sinéad Moynihan: So a lot of awareness of what was going on, I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. And I'd like to say more of the ’90s than the ’80s, but you know, we can, we'll just leave it, we'll leave it sort of blurry.

Zalfa Feghali: Time is a patriarchal construct, don't worry. It's whatever you need it to be. 

Gillian Roberts: Let's go with ’90s.

Sinéad Moynihan: So yeah, it was all over the news. So anybody living in Britain and Ireland, and I assume to a lesser extent in other places, but in Britain and Ireland, I think it was very much at the forefront of the news and the stuff going on, especially in the ’80s. My parents were born late ’40s, early ’50s. So my dad would be like 18, 19 when the Troubles started. We never went there on holiday, and they never went to Belfast until after I did. I went in like March 1997 to visit a friend who was studying at Queen's, and they went that summer for the first time. So I went before they did because they were just of that generation who were coming of age at the start of the Troubles and it was like you just don't go to Northern Ireland. I remember going on family holiday to County Cavan and we did go over the border into Enniskillen which is in County Fermanagh. And it was uneventful, but I do remember the border checks. You know, I do remember armed people at the border and that was probably my only experience of that, because we just didn't do it. I mean, we went to Donegal as young children, and so they would have crossed a border into and then out of Northern Ireland to get to Donegal.

Gillian Roberts: Right. As a shortcut.

Sinéad Moynihan: But I don't have any real memory of that. I suppose the thing is that although it was very prominent in terms of the media and stuff, people just didn't go. It was like it was a different country. You would be more likely to go to England or somewhere else than go to Northern Ireland during the ’80s and early ’90s.

Gillian Roberts: So that’s really interesting in terms of almost a time lag of the partition itself coming into being in the 1920s. And then it becomes a harder border later on from what you're describing in terms of your parents’ experiences.

Sinéad Moynihan: Yeah and if you're interested there's a book that just came out by Stephen O'Neill about partition and Irish culture, and it goes from like 1921 to 1955 so it's those kind of early years of partition and he talks about, and I think this is really true because this is the way it was presented to me say in school, that the partition was retrospectively constructed as inevitable you know, that when it happened, it was like, but of course it had to happen or it was always going to happen. And these divisions went back so long and, you know, they sort of retrospectively historicised it back 300 years, even though, you know, it happened in 1921 and they were already doing this a year or two or 10 years later, presenting it as this kind of inevitable thing. And I think that's sort of how it was presented to me. And it was only really when I started doing that research around the returned Yank and the troubles that some of the stuff I learned in school I had to unlearn.

Gillian Roberts: So that's interesting. That suggests that that is sort of specialist knowledge. It's not just a generational thing where people no longer see that as a natural development, but rather you came to that conclusion through your own independent research.

Sinéad Moynihan: Well, this is how it was taught to me. We fought this war of independence. You know, we sent Michael Collins and his delegation over to London to negotiate with David Lloyd George. We were never going to get the 32 counties. So we compromised and got the 26 counties. And so I suppose to present it in any other way is to present it, well you know, as a failure. So it had to be retrospectively constructed as all we were going to get or it was inevitable, because the six counties were a majority Protestant or whatever it happened to be. And it was particularly important in the ’80s to construct it in that way because otherwise you could potentially be supporting the sort of militant agitation that was taking place in the north of Ireland. So if you were to come out and say, or if you were to be taught in school, well, there was actually nothing inevitable about the construction of this border, then that's like saying, well, actually, I support what the IRA is doing in the north. So there was a particular ideological reason why it had to be taught that way in the ’80s, I think.

Zalfa Feghali: It's really interesting because the causal relationship that is being constructed is a very knowing construction. We know that this is made up, and yet we must continue to go along with this made-up narrative. So much so that we then believe it, demand others believe it, but also know that we don't believe it. I think that's utterly fascinating, and it is very much the case with other examples. I mean, we can talk later about this maybe, but other examples of partition that we've seen, Gillian, right, and that we think about globally.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Do you have a sense of how people in Northern Ireland might have been taught about that partition, you know, if it's seen as inevitable in terms of your education in the Republic of Ireland? I'm just thinking about those Catholic counties in Northern Ireland that were effectively stranded so that Northern Ireland wouldn't be too small, just a small number of Protestant-dominated counties. What would their kind of version of that history have looked like?

Sinéad Moynihan: I think one of the things, just chatting to different people who've been educated Catholically in the north, I guess one of the things that's interesting is that they will often opt in to the Irish language, for example, which for us was not an option, it was compulsory. So they've got a different attitude to the Irish language compared to a lot of people who are educated in the south who kind of hate it. And there's a different attitude to things like the GAA, the Gaelic Athletic Association, which is a 32-county phenomenon, but which tends to be more militant in the north. So for example, historically, if you were playing GAA sports, there was a ban on foreign sports. You know, you weren't supposed to play soccer or golf or tennis or rugby. And when they were discussing getting rid of that, a long time ago now, it was partly about that time when Croke Park was being refurbished. No, it was Lansdowne Road was being done up, the rugby stadium, and they wanted to use Croke Park for rugby. And it was clear that in some of the northern counties, there was still very strong opposition to removing the ban on foreign sports, whereas in most parts of the country people were like, yeah, you know, I don't care if someone plays rugby or golf or whatever. So there can be, for obvious reasons, a stronger desire to connect with things like the Irish language, the sports, because those things are besieged. I suppose people feel more besieged in the north than they did in the south.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. And you talked about sort of your first time you were aware of crossing the border into Northern Ireland. Now you spend a lot more time in Northern Ireland. How has that relationship adapted and adjusted for you since your younger years?

Sinéad Moynihan: Yeah, it's a really good question, because we own a house in Belfast so we, you know, I'm here in Belfast at the moment. My first visits to the North really were to visit a friend who was studying at Queen's. And I suppose talking about my dad, say he was 18, 19 when the Troubles broke out. I was 18, 19, 20 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. So that's, you know, I suppose it's a generational kind of shift from I'm not going anywhere near the North to things are better, it's not so bad, you know, I'm going to go and visit. So I'd visited many times before we actually moved here. I mean, I would say Belfast still feels like an edgy place. You know, it feels like in a good way, I think it doesn't feel homogenous in the way that some cities do. It doesn't feel like a cookie cutter, like it doesn't feel like it's like every other city. It has that kind of edge to it, which I think is interesting and often productive, you know, culturally and in lots of different ways. And of course, the border now is, is almost non-existent. They never stop the trains going south, so if you get on a train, they'll never stop it on the border to check passports or anything. But they do stop coaches sometimes, and that's happened to me a couple of times.

Gillian Roberts: And is that just post-Brexit that that's happened?

Sinéad Moynihan: No, I think both times were actually pre-Brexit. Yeah, I think in theory they can. What I'm unsure about is what they would do. In both cases, I had my passport with me. I think I was heading to the airport, so I had my passport with me anyway. But I'm not sure what they would do if I was like, well, I don't have my passport with me. But like, I mean, how do you prove that you can cross that border or whatever? I mean, it's the Common Travel Area. So any UK or Irish citizen can cross it. But I guess if you're not either of those things, then in theory, it's still an international border.

Gillian Roberts: I experienced that. I think I've mentioned that on this podcast, so I'll just say it again very briefly. When I flew from Dublin to Leeds, this was before I was a UK citizen and almost everyone seemingly getting off that flight were either Irish or British, and then I was sort of holding very timidly my Canadian passport aloft feeling like I ought to show somebody and the woman in the airport was just sort of like completely befuddled by it, and was sort of like, oh, um, um, oh, uh. And she also knew that something should happen with me, and she wasn't entirely sure how to go about managing it just because there was zero expectation that somebody would have a passport that they needed to show at that point. So it was a very funny moment. Perhaps not for her. Maybe that was the most stressful bit of her day. I don't know.

Sinéad Moynihan: I have heard as well that Fulbright UK tells people that they shouldn't, you know, like let's say you get a Fulbright and you're going to be in Belfast because they always, at Queen's, they always have a Fulbright person. I think they do tell them not to enter the country from Dublin. There's some reason they want you entering the UK at a UK port, airport. I think it messes up all their visas or records or systems if, you know, you were to fly into Dublin, say, and then just take the coach up. They do not want you doing that, I have heard.

Gillian Roberts: And is that a post-Brexit thing as well?

Sinéad Moynihan: That is not post-Brexit. I think, again, that's just… It's always been the case.

Gillian Roberts: Wow.

Zalfa Feghali: No, it is really strange. I mean, this isn't as highbrow as a university system. I used to spend a reasonable amount of time in Ireland occasionally and whenever we landed in Dublin, we'd rent a car and what we were asked consistently was, will you be going over the border, because you can't do that with this car?

Sinéad Moynihan: Oh yeah, yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: The first time I said, well, I don't think so, mainly because I didn't know our plans, but we had to kind of declare that we would not be driving over the border, even accidentally, which is something actually that if you live near the border, you may well do so. 

Sinéad Moynihan: Several times a day. 

Zalfa Feghali: Right. Just to get to the supermarket or whatever. So it is a really interesting, I don't know where the line, excusing the pun, I don't know where the line is drawn, even though we do.

Gillian Roberts: It's on the map, Zalfa.

Zalfa Feghali: In the water sometimes, Gillian.

Gillian Roberts: Yes, I've definitely had experience of going over a tiny bridge and finding myself having crossed over. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yep, that's what it meant!

Sinéad Moynihan: Yes, we had friends visiting from Bristol several years ago and they hired a car in Belfast. And they again were told you are only insured to drive this car in the UK. And we had no plans to go to the south or whatever, but we were traveling around and like we kind of joked about it, but it was kind of like, oh, we're in the Republic now. Oh, God, now we're back over the border. It's OK. But yeah, no, it's that I'd forgotten that. That's that's true. The other thing is of course this is sort of an interesting aspect of the unpoliced or invisible border is that like in Ireland quite a long time ago they moved to kilometres per hour and obviously the UK it's still in miles so if you cross the border on a coach or in a car or whatever they'll say welcome to Northern Ireland. The signs are in miles per hour. And that's sort of it. You know, that's the key thing you need to be aware of.

Zalfa Feghali: It's so interesting, though, because you do have some towns that are relatively close to the border that will still have signs in miles in the Republic. And just occasionally, like an old country road sign, I would then clock it and then get confused as to where I was. But you're driving along and you move from kilometres to miles. And if it's just an ordinary road, there won't always be a sign saying, just so you know, pay attention to this. You just have to work it out, which I actually, I found very amusing at the time. And the people I was with pointed it out to me because they knew I'd be interested.

Gillian Roberts: I'm trying to think, when you cross from the US into Canada, you get signs that say ‘think metric’ with the KM smushed together in like, I don't know, a different colour or a different, you know, bold font or something. And I'm trying to remember whether they do an equivalent sometimes if they go kind of 50, you know, miles, 80...

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, equals whatever. Oh, okay.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, I can't quite, I might be completely inventing that.

Sinéad Moynihan: They don't do that here, but then I think Americans are very attached to mileage. So they might need that instruction, you know, 50 miles is 80 kilometres or whatever. Whereas Ireland did move 20 or 30 years ago. You know, it's fairly recent. You know, I think they're just like, no, the signs are miles. Get on with it.

Gillian Roberts: But what I can't remember is whether there's any kind of inverse signage going to the States from Canada. So maybe some of our listeners can tell us whether there are reminders that you'll be going in miles instead—Don't drive so slowly!—instead of kilometres.

Zalfa Feghali: At least it's on the same side of the road. I remember living in Canterbury heading towards, you know, towns or cities that we've had ferries, people coming off ferries in their cars. There were instructions saying, we drive on this side of the road. This is the measurement system. So that's at least something.

Sinéad Moynihan: They have that at Dublin Airport, Belfast Airport. Leaving, it's like drive on the left. In German, French. Because people have just hired cars and they don't want people getting into accidents as soon as they're leaving the airport. 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, yeah, exactly. One of the things that you've just mentioned is, you know, different languages, English, French, and that's obviously the fact that Ireland is in the EU, unlike a certain place from where I speak, in terms of a mainland place. We know that you travel between Exeter and Belfast a lot. How has that changed since Brexit?

Sinéad Moynihan: It hasn't at all, because the Common Travel Area predates the EU membership of both Ireland and the UK. They joined at the same time, obviously Ireland is still in it. So the Common Travel Area still applies. The things that were noticeable after Brexit were, well first the teething problems around getting stuff into the country, and this is the most bourgeois thing I bet anyone is going to say on your podcast. But it was during Covid because I'm trying to think when everything took effect. Was it in? It was in December 2020 because they were trying to avoid that cliff edge or whatever, you know, and anyway, they eventually reached a deal. And in January ’21, when we were all in lockdown, and I was desperately trying to order stuff from John Lewis. 

Zalfa Feghali: Love it.

Sinéad Moynihan: They wouldn't deliver to Northern Ireland for those first six, seven weeks. They just had a notice on their website saying, look, we're just working out how to follow these new regulations and do everything. It'll be back soon, but we can't do it right now. So there was a lot of that kind of uncertainty in those. And I was here because it was during Covid. And things around food and perishables and plants, and even now you'll see these labels because if there's a store that operates in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland like Tesco or Marks and Spencer or something, if you go into M&S or Tesco in the north, it'll have a not for EU label on it. So it's kind of just like an instruction to whoever's delivering this, deliver this to the right M&S, you know, don't send this to the south.

Gillian Roberts: Don't let the Dubliners have it!

Sinéad Moynihan: Exactly. So that stuff’s kind of is interesting and very visible, I think.

Zalfa Feghali: We're kind of back to taxes in a weird way. 

Gillian Roberts: Treaties!

Sinéad Moynihan: The circulation of goods and food and perishables.

Zalfa Feghali: Recently, for obvious reasons, bought a bottle of sunblock and it said not for sale in the EU. God! I mean, this is Leicester.

Gillian Roberts: The sun is different though in the EU. They have to have their own products. 

Zalfa Feghali: Something's different. 

Gillian Roberts: Sinéad, we like to ask our guests if there's a border they have known, an experience of border crossings that they would like to share with us and our listeners.

Sinéad Moynihan: Well, I guess the border that I've crossed most frequently other than the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is the U, because I go there relatively frequently for research. And I suppose every time I cross that border, I feel privileged, you know, because I'm not being interrogated in the way some people are. I'm sort of empowered to, or certainly have been many times empowered to cross that border and not worry about the kinds of things that are happening to other people trying to cross that border. I've almost exclusively crossed it in airports just once, not in an airport. That was when I was on a train to Canada, so it was coming back into the country from Canada. But I suppose the interesting thing is that I often but not always do that through Dublin pre-clearance.

Zalfa Feghali: I was going to ask you whether you do that. 

Sinéad Moynihan: That's just weird because whenever you're getting on a plane to go to the US or in my case anyway, you're like, OK. I am going for legitimate reasons. It is allowed under the terms of the ESTA and all of that. But yeah, you know, you do have a moment of like, OK, what if they ask me this? What if they ask me that? And what if they were to send me back on a plane or... But the thing is, you know, if that were to happen in Dublin, it would be OK, because you'd be in Dublin and you wouldn't have to go through the trauma of like having to get back on a plane or any of that stuff. So yeah, it's just very interesting because there are Homeland Security people, but of course, they've been seconded to Ireland probably for a few years. So they tend to be a bit nicer and a bit kind of more chilled out than the ones in the US. And it tends to be very quick, you know, and then they sort of say, welcome to the United States of America, but you're still in Dublin Airport, and there's a picture of the President above all the kiosks and everything. And then you go through and there's very little in that bit of the airport because everyone's just waiting to go to the US. But if you go to the lounge, which is another, oh my God, bourgeois thing to say on this, John Lewis, airport lounges, oh my goodness,

Zalfa Feghali: It's what we've been missing this whole time, Sinéad. It's fine.

Sinéad Moynihan: Oh, my God. If you go in the lounge, there's certain stuff they won't serve, because basically you're officially in the United States of America. So like there's certain like pork products and maybe even dairy things that don't conform to U.S. standards, FDA or whatever standards, so they don't serve them in the lounge, which I do think is so interesting.

Zalfa Feghali: Wow.

Sinéad Moynihan: Because it's like you're basically in the U.S., but you're not.

Gillian Roberts:  But you're not. I mean, I've experienced preclearance from the Canadian side of the Canada-U.S. border, and I felt that was weird enough. Dublin isn't anywhere near the United States. So I think that must just be even more of a strange, surreal experience, especially that insistence, “Welcome to America,” when you haven't crossed the Atlantic yet.

Sinéad Moynihan: You haven't even got on the plane. Yeah, you know, you still have that seven-hour or whatever, five-hour, ten-hour flight, depending on where you're going. But yeah, that's a very privileged story about border crossing. Very much spoken from a position of privilege.

Gillian Roberts: Well, thank you for sharing that with us. And thank you for speaking to us this afternoon. 

Sinéad Moynihan: Well, thank you for having me. It's been lovely.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, it's been great. Thank you, Sinéad. 

What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.