Brexit could make simple commercial life on Border complicated

With a resolution to the Brexit back-stop issue eluding the sharpest minds of British politics, commercial life on the border may soon become much more complicated. Free flowing traffic could be replaced by queues, delays and hassle.

Tommy Cassidy owns a thriving service station that literally straddles the Border on the Ballyconnell/Derrylin Road. Tommy acts as the Celt's Border diviner in pointing out the invisible contours where County Fermanagh gives way to Cavan. Two thirds of his storage warehouse is in the Republic, the remainder in North.

“Is anybody going to put a customs post between Ballyconnell and Derrylin?” ponders Tommy on a freezing Thursday morning. “You could not do that here at the present time with  the volume of transport travelling on this road from the Quinn Group and all the other industries and general motoring traffic – you would have queues miles long and you would have very aggravated people,” he predicted. 

He says the Border has barely made and indentation in the lives of those in the surrounding area, where there are "many many crossings" beyond solely the Ballyconnell/Derrylin Road. 

“We don’t have a river, we have land boundaries to show us where the Border exists," he notes, adding:

"We would have seen a lot of cross Border business in the last 27 years, I don’t think it will change.

“Really and truly, where is the Border going to be put in the morning in our particular business, and we are only one business,” said Tommy Cassidy.

Cassidys' meet the daily consumer needs of the farmers and families. They deliver domestic oils around homes in Killeshandra, Ballyconnell, Bawnboy, you name it and into Leitrim, and also south Fermanagh.

“Most of the feed we sell here comes from Lakeland Dairies and we sell it North and South and we store it North and South in the one building.” Pointing to the roof, Tommy asks: “Where is the Border going to be drawn? Up there?”

“Currently, we don’t know what is going to happen,” he admits with a level of frustration, explaining that the only difference the Border has made until now is the currency in which his customers pay.

“We can’t see where Brexit would be going in relation to whether we can or cannot sell products to individual people in different States.

“We don’t really understand Brexit in the form it is in now – so there is going to have to be a lot of changes before we would know exactly how the Border would operate or if it will be operational.”

Tommy predicts that if there is a hard Border, theose working in the agri-sector would suffer most.

“Today Lakeland Dairies is taking milk from Northern Ireland. So if there is going to be a hard Border, where are the farmers of NI going to go with their product? There is no processing plant in NI large enough to process these volumes of milk.

“The farmers will be at a big loss - there is no lamb processing plant large enough in NI to take the volume of lamb and where will it go from the farms in NI? Personally, I can’t see this hard Border they speak about - if there is going to be one, who is going to man it?”

• See will be a full report on our visit to the Border on the Ballyconnell/Derrylin road last week in The Anglo-Celt next Wednesday, together with the opinions of business people in the Town of Ballyconnell.