‘Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. 24/7,” bemoans one young Northern Irish man to his mates. “If it comes on [TV], I just go on my phone.” Annabel Verbeke’s piece of amiable, breeze-shooting psychogeography whiles away a few afternoons on and around the Carlingford Lough ferry, which crosses the invisible Ireland-Northern Ireland border. Anxieties about the possibility of a hard border raise the spectre of old enmities, but the general excitement over spotting one frontier-oblivious local – Finn the dolphin – shows there is no sectarian divide a few aquatic somersaults can’t cross.
Amid the various day-trippers, kite-flyers, golfers, BMX bandits, farmers, hearse drivers and other punters eavesdropped on by Verbeke, you get the impression that she herself may think borders are arbitrary and meaningless. As a group of Asian tourists comment, borders obscure the similarities, or sameness, of the people on either side. The two northern gents chatting outside a Protestant church – one of whom comments pointedly on how Dublin is becoming “cosmopolitan” – presumably don’t agree. Ethnocentrism is evidently a hardy plant. One southerner, who approves of multiculturalism and refuses to recognise the border, still says: “The British will never be able to take my Irishness away from me.”
