De Selby’s numerical calculations

My experience of Irish government state employees at the ‘border’ is that they aim to be the antithesis of ‘hostile’. It is not a bad USP. Passing through Dublin or Cork is an enjoyable experience: “Welcome home Jonathan’, is not the most formal salute; or, in the case of my wife, “Lisa — from Mulfulira—I remember you”. But this aside in the Economist, brings a little of the Flann O’Brien to the party.

In the 1970s, when contraceptives were still banned in the Irish republic, a family-planning campaigner went south with 40,000 condoms in his station wagon; his insistence that they were all “for personal use” was met with good-humoured banter by an Irish police patrol.

The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics. By Diarmaid Ferriter. (reviewed in the economist)

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