Declan Daly - Borderline - An Oral History of the Brexit Wars 2020-2022

April 2021. Lieutenant (Lt) Brian Quinlan looked over his shoulder at the woman still asleep with her back to him in bed. As arguments go, last nights was up there with the best he’d seen and he reckoned it might be the last one. He got it, of course, none of it was easy for anyone but giving him shit about being away all the time was a bit much when, as a cabin crewmember on the ongoing PPE runs around the world, she wasn’t around too much either. And there was a war on. And he was in the Army. He felt like a lot of leeway should be kind of implicit in that. They were both over tired from work, on the second bottle of wine (still half drunk on the table, last he saw) and things had gone downhill again. Either way, it was time to go.

He wondered if they hadn’t been in lockdown together last year and if her apartment hadn’t been a ten minute walk from the Brugha would they have been together this long at all. Convenience vs increasing mutual distaste for each other? Such philsophical wanderings aside, he began the process of getting out of bed. What hurt today? Old favourites, his lower back while he was still lying down for one. He shuffled to the edge of the bed and swung his legs out slowly. Standing up, his right ankle felt like someone had poured dry rice krispies into the joint and his left knee nearly went from under him with the sharp pain that was now more or less normal when ever he put any kind of lateral load on it.

Half waddling, half limping with one hand on his warm, spongey feeling, painful lower back region, he snap, crackle and popped his way to the bathroom with his remaining lower joints joining the dawn chorus of complaint at being made to move. This, he reminded himself for the millionth time,is not how twenty five year olds were meant to get up. But, landing badly after a overly enthusiastic ‘hey looked the Lt jumped before the hover’ dismount from a AW139 near the border in December had had a lasting effect on him especially since resting in any way was out of the question.

In the bathroom he surveyed the shelf at the window until he saw what he wanted. She always seemed to have a stock of painkillers in here somewhere, the good ones that you couldn’t get in the chemists but which she stocked up on in passing through airports. He’d miss those. He popped two of the amber liquid filled capsules in his mouth and, considering his upcoming departure forever, decided to throw the rest of the sheet from the box into his shaving bag. A hot shower (and strong, not available over the counter, levels of codeine) sorted out the worst of the pain issues for the moment and he was a bit more positively disposed to the world when he left the bathroom. From the bedroom door, he took one more look at the still sleeping figure under the duvet. Should he wake her? Say something? No, enough had been said last night. Grabbing his bag from the hall and closing the front door behind him he put on his sunglasses, face mask and earphones. Backs. Knees. Relationships.The Black Winter had really fucked a lot of things up.

The period beginning in October 2020 and running until the end of the March 2021 has entered the public lexicon as The Black Winter. A number of events compounded each other to seriously dent the country’s morale and put doubt on it’s ability to cope with further stressors. This of course made enemies bolder and our own forces were put under even more pressure. The re- emergence of the IRA as a heavily armed threat surprised many commentators as the Russian connection had not yet been confirmed publicly. The change in tactics away from the old Green Book of IRA doctrine should have been less of a surprise than it was. Half a century old and put together under different circumstances, it could only be expected to have changed. Internationally, the relationship between the UK and the EU, but particularily Ireland, was becoming more charged as the full implications of Brexit began to bite down.

Perhaps the greatest driver of national stress though was the failure of the first Covid-19-19 vaccine to provide protection to the majority of the community. Peaking at 35% effectiveness with 18 – 35 year olds and with a low of only 11% for the over 65 groups, the rush to market had resulted in an imperfect product. These numbers too, only reflected the healthy, fit individuals that could take it. Those with underlying conditions were often precluded due to to some of the side effects which, while temporary, could exacerbate problems for those with breathing and cardiac issues already. The disappointment of this product coincided with the series of localised lockdowns and restrictions that had to be reintroduced to deal with Covid-19 flare ups in some parts of the country. These would be a contentious and continuous feature of The Black Winter with serious economic and human impacts.

Also around this time came the start of the second wave of deaths from the first wave of infection. Many of those in the younger age groups, who were presumed to have fully recovered began, from 5 – 9 months post Covid-19 recovery, to suffer from strokes and cardiac events. This was especially the case for those involved in physical work or sport and usually involved a sudden onset of symptoms. Over the course of The Black Winter, one hundred an eighty four people between the ages of eighteen and forty died of Covid-19 related strokes and heart attacks, with another six hundred and two surviving with mixed levels of recovery.

Thirty four of these people were members of the Defence Forces with eleven of these dying. For an increasingly small organisation, these were big numbers, especially as most of them occured in Cavan. As the location accounting for seven of the fatalaties, the Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Co Cavan known as Starfort 4 was considered a cursed location before it eventually burned down. As there were also four combat related deaths and a stunning twenty four injuries in and around the base, it was little surprise that no one in the Defence Forces was sorry to see it go.

The short life and slow death of Starfort 4

A snap and admittedly temporary move to put troops back onto the border, the Starforts were a series of earthern embankment and HESCO container constructions designed to house and support a Company (Coy) strength unit in the field. In practice there was rarely more than a Platoon plus, around fifty people. Compared to similar FOBS such as the one used in Goz Beida in Chad, the footprint had shrunk significantly, there was no real empty spaces and the only clear area of any considerable size was the flat area left open as the helipad. The walls were folded in towards the centre to allow mutual support from the observation posts at each corner and to channel any potential attack into a kill zone between them. Viewed from above, they resembled a four pointed star, hence Starfort. The line of FOBS were not numbered in order East to West, but in order of construction – Starfort 11 for example was the next position East of Starfort 4. They were never comfortable but Starfort 4 was considered the worst of all for a number of reasons.

The first was location. Whereas the other FOBs were mostly located on highground, or at very least a tactically sound location, Starfort 4 was nestled at the bottom of a small wooded ridge which lay to the North and with smaller sets of hills East and West. Rumours were that the fields on the highground belonged to the relative of a TD and were removed from the list of compulsory purchase orders. This left the FOB not only in an unenviable tactical position, but also built on what was essentially a miniature flood plain for the river that flowed around the area in a semi circle to their South. This meant that the ground was almost always wet, and in a FOB where that ground was constantly churned by feet and wheels, that meant omnipresent mud. According to the troops who passed through it, the only relief from the mud in your sleeping bag came when the ground froze during Winter into spikes of sharp dirt instead.