I was born in Belfast in 1981 and, like Timothy Phillips, I am Protestant. However, the picture he paints of crossing the border into the Republic of Ireland as a six-year-old is not recognisable to me (A moment that changed me: ‘We crossed the border from Northern Ireland when I was six, and the adults bristled’, 5 October).
I went on annual summer holidays to various tourist destinations in the south with my parents and grandmother throughout the 80s and 90s. Phillips says “Protestants like us tended not to cross the border much”, but many Protestant families had similar holidays to us. My parents even had their honeymoon in the Irish republic in the 70s, when the Troubles were at their worst.
Northern Irish rugby fans, among whom were a lot of Protestant grammar school boys, also travelled to Dublin’s Lansdowne Road stadium all through the Troubles.
The border checkpoints were just a necessary part of life. I knew this even as a child. In a country where shootings and bombings dominated the headlines, it made sense that cars going across the border needed to be checked for terrorists and weapons. And sure, it was a moment of seriousness, but not peril. My main memory is of being bored in the queue.
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