Roused by Brexit to revisit his Northern Irish Protestant roots, Anton Thompson-McCormick took his English boyfriend David Bradford on a cycle along the Irish Border. Riding across the Border into Donegal felt to me like bursting free into a land with a lighter atmosphere. What border?” he shouted, and it took me a moment to catch his rhetorical gist: people around here don’t recognise the Border. “Hard border, hard border!” the Catholic end heckled. Once the appointed defenders of imperial liberty encouraged to believe they were “the people”, Border Protestants now found themselves cut adrift in a changed world, no longer assured of their status.

Source: The Irish Times December 15, 2018 06:00 UTC