Border set to new passport regulations

BRITISH prime minister Gordon Brown and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern have decided to erect an e-border that will abolish the age-old common travel area between the two islands and, since 1922, the two states in this archipelago.

From 2009, everybody travelling from one to the other will have to carry a machine-readable passport.

But because even Brown and Ahern recognise the impossibility of policing the meandering 80-year-old Irish border, the passport checks will have to be not at land crossings, but at the air and seaports on either side of the Irish Sea.