BorderIrish or @BorderIrish was the pseudonym of an anonymous satirical author, resident on the island of Ireland, who from 2018 to 2020 wrote in the first person about being the 97-year-old 499 km (310 mi) Irish border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland (i.e. an anthropomorphism), both on Twitter as @BorderIrish and in print with I Am the Border, So I Am (2019);[1] and in particular on the implications of Brexit on the Irish land border.[2][3][4][5]
Authorship
The author first began posting satirical tweets as the Irish border in February 2018, tweeting "I'm seamless and frictionless already, thanks. Bit scared of physical infrastructure. Don't like the sea".[6][7] In a December 2018 interview with Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung, BorderIrish said (as the border): "I had retired and spent the past 20 years watching the sheep and the clouds. Everyone had forgotten me, but then Brexit came and suddenly journalists were looking for me and politicians were talking nonsense about me, so I decided to make me heard".[5]
In a December 2018 interview with BBC News (both as the author, and as the border), the author identified as male, and said he had lived on both sides of the border;[3] however, he has not clarified any other facts regarding his identity, and speaks through his agents.[8][9]
The author has been interviewed as his pseudonym, both by Irish and British media[6][10][3] and by media from the European continent;[7][5] and his satirical tweets as the Irish border have been discussed in wider media coverage on Brexit.[11][12][13]
On 31 January 2020, as the United Kingdom left the European Union, BorderIrish announced that he was retiring his Twitter account telling The Irish Times: "It feels like I won the battle and lost the war"; and signing off his Twitter account with "I was the Border, so I was".[15]
Works
In October 2019, BorderIrish released a book titled I Am the Border, So I Am,[1] which was favourably reviewed,[16][17][18] and described by Fintan O'Toole as "among the best satires of the Brexit era",[19] and listed by Alex Clark in the Financial Times "Best audiobooks of 2019".[20]
^Julien Marsault (13 November 2019). "Sur Twitter, l'humour sans limite de " The Irish Border "" [On Twitter, the boundless humor of "The Irish Border"]. Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 26 December 2019. Les Monty Python n'auraient pas renié le compte @BorderIrish qui s'exprime sur le Brexit au nom de la ligne, presque invisible, qui sépare les deux Irlandes. [Monty Python would not have surpassed the humour of the twitter account @BorderIrish, which expresses the effect of Brexit on the almost invisible line which separates the two Irelands.]
^Alex Clark (22 November 2019). "Best books of 2019: Audiobooks". Financial Times. Retrieved 26 December 2019. What started life as a satirical Twitter account has slowly morphed into an insightful spotlight on the vagaries, complexities and historical importance of perhaps the most intractable and misunderstood aspects of Brexit.
