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.

Including of course — wait for it — the infamous Heathrow slots.

We didn’t sign the Schengen agreement because of the common travel area.

We have decided to opt out of the urgent practical necessity of the recent proposals from our European mainland partners to take common measures against transnational trafficking in drugs, guns and people because of a common travel area which will not exist two years hence.

Forget about those trivialities. The most serious consequence is that when the North’s First Minister, Dr Ian Paisley, wants to travel to London — within his beloved United Kingdom — he will have to flash the lion and unicorn on his British passport.

When he travels to Dublin in the foreign country he knows as the Republic of Ireland, he will not need to do so.

How’s them apples? Or should I say, Oranges?

Maurice O’Connell

Forge Park

Oakpark

Tralee

Co Kerry