Remembering Brian Hutton: Reflections on Brian's final journey inspired reflections on the Border

It is quite natural to move back and forth between Donegal and Derry in that corner of Ireland, where we try not to pay attention to the Border.

The Mass was held in Brian's hometown, Derry, Northern Ireland. His remains were then taken to Co Donegal in the Republic for burial. The graveyard was empty, but his friends and loved ones crossed the border to return to the North to share their memories over food in a Derry restaurant about Brian's endless kindness and good humor.

In the midst of the despair, a colleague from the South innocently commented on the curiosity of attending a funeral in two jurisdictions. I felt that Brian's final journey might have brought home what the Border meant for many Derry people of our generation. We ignored it.

For many Troubles-era Derry residents, however, escaping to Donegal meant a relief from tension. It was the county next to it with beautiful beaches, I don't know how deeply we thought about it at that time. Once you arrived, there weren't any British soldiers; there was no RUC; there was no hassle.

Brian loved swimming at Forty Foot when he lived in Dublin, according to the priest who officiated his funeral. But he clearly preferred the wild Atlantic to passive Irish Sea and had returned to the northwest before his death.

I would have loved to hear Brian's thoughts on the recent poll results of North and South. This was a collaboration between The Irish Times and ARINS. It is part of the Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South project.

We would have had a lot of fun with the cross-Border connections findings, which unsurprisingly for us Derry/Donegal aficionados decreased as we got further from the Border. The polling revealed that geography is important when it comes to relationships. 58% of respondents in Munster didn't have cross-Border connections. This is a higher percentage than the 27% in Connacht/Ulster.

Also of interest were the focus-group comments about the "othering” of Northerners in Republic. I didn't realize we were supposed be offended by the Nordie term, as one Northern woman who participated in the survey said. "My brother has lived in north Dublin for about two decades and he still gets that Nordie label down there," she complained.

During the pandemic, I worked from home sometimes. Freya McClements, our Northern correspondent at the time, was also "up there", as was Brian, who was responsible for grabbing all the news from both sides. It was a joke between us three: How would the South Co Dublin Irish Times reader react if they found out their beloved newspaper was being produced in another part of the country?Some people may find the idea of being "othered” to be hopelessly woken. However, Northerners were "othered", when coronavirus first emerged. Cases were recorded county-by-county, and otherwise perfectly reasonable people spoke casually about needing to "close the Border" in order to stop the spread.

It revealed a fundamental lack in understanding about the ties between Derry and Donegal and how people cross the Border to study, work, or just to purchase petrol and provisions. Can there be two counties in Ireland that are so connected?However, as restrictions eased north of the Border, I found some hope in the many young people who were travelling from the South to Belfast and "discovering the city" as a decent place to spend a night out.