A cross-Border centre with a low-key approach to bridging gaps between North and South is quietly making a difference, reports Susan McKay.
Brenda Kearns knows more than most about the ways in which crossing the Border can get complicated. Based in Letterkenny, Co Donegal, she meets people every day who have got themselves lost between the two largely unco-ordinated systems which operate North and South.
Recently a woman called who was from Louth in the Republic but had moved to the North with her husband, who is from Derry. They had four children, but their marriage had failed, and she wanted to move South again. They needed to sort out issues relating to custody, child benefit, the Child Support Agency, the Maintenance Recovery Unit, income support, medical cards, tax credits and carers' allowance.
All of this had already got the couple tangled up in endless phonecalls and forms. "The woman was already completely stressed because of the breakdown of her marriage, and having to deal with all these different agencies was the last thing she needed. She was in no fit state. I was able to sit down with her and go through the whole thing and get it sorted out," says Kearns, a Citizens Advice Bureau employee on a project called Borderwise. The project is working on a series of leaflets for those who cross the Border to live or work.
Amazingly, she is one of just three workers in Ireland, North and South, who has had specialist training in cross-Border advice and information. "And one of the others has just moved to England," she says. "There is a huge need for more workers to be trained like me. There are large numbers of Northerners taking up work in the South and getting caught up in all sorts of tax complexities, for example. There is a lot of uncharted territory."
The Centre for Cross-Border Studies was set up to identify and deal with situations like these.
"After the Good Friday agreement was signed, a group of us sat down to think about what further and higher education could do to help the peace process," says Andy Pollak, director of the centre. "We decided on a small research centre to look at cross-Border issues. We went to Queen's University in Belfast and Dublin City University for backing."
Along with administrator Mairead Hughes, Pollak, a former education correspondent with The Irish Times, started work from a couple of small offices based in the Armagh outreach department of Queen's.
"We spent a year talking to people and we did a series of mapping studies to see where the gaps were," he says.
The gaps exist in education, health, business, public administration, communications, agriculture, planning and the environment. An early report looked at barriers to cross-Border mobility.
"One of our best reports was on the lessons of the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in 2001," says Pollak. "That fed into policy adopted by both governments."
The focus of the peace process was on ending violence, then on setting up the institutions at Stormont. With all the strife that has surrounded these huge projects, Pollak feels that strand two of the agreement, the North-South element, has been sidelined.
"It is as if we stumbled into the Good Friday agreement. Nobody in Dublin ever sat down and asked, 'How will we embed this in policy?' The North-South bodies are there on a care-and-maintenance basis but there is no long-term thinking."
The centre has this year set up North-South training courses for civil servants.
"The first since partition," says Pollak proudly. "Every department in the Republic has a North-South unit of seven or eight people, and they are meant to be able to deal with the issues. But no one had trained them about the North, its ethos, how it works."
The four-day course looks at a wide range of issues, including co-operation in the public and non-governmental organisation (NGO) sectors, public finance and governance, and economic and business co-operation. If civil servants are equipped with this knowledge, it should make life easier for people such as the woman who came to Brenda Kearns.
During the courses, civil servants from either side of the Border work together researching cross-Border initiatives that work - including a waste-management scheme for old fridges in Dundalk.
"What we are showing is that North-South co-operation can work, not because of the Good Friday agreement but because it makes eminent sense. It makes things better. It is important to show unionists that this is the case. Northern business nowadays recognises the need to do business on an all-Ireland basis," says Pollak.
He is reluctant to be drawn into making generalisations about the differences between the North and the South, Northerners and Southerners.
However, he says there has been an attitude in the Republic that the North is only about the Troubles.
"The South is a far more confident and prosperous place than the North. There is more willingness to be open and to innovate. The North is a deeply divided and troubled province of a country with a capital which is a long way away, and which hasn't been very interested in Europe. There is a caginess about the Northern approach, a conservatism. The North has been dangerously dependent on state subventions."
In the new year, the centre will launch a major new resource. BorderIreland.info is the brainchild of its research manager, Patricia Clarke, who has been working on it since 2003. This will provide free access to an online searchable database of all available cross-Border information on education, health, agriculture, transport, environment and tourism.
"There's a lot of cross-Border activity and a lot of duplication of work going on," says Clarke.
"The website will direct people to work that's already been done, and it will also give people access to ideas which they can replicate in their own areas. For example, in the Louth-Down Border area, renal dialysis services are being provided in Newry for Southerners who would otherwise have to go to Dublin."
The centre itself is unique - a thriving little institution which is working away to help the peace process put down roots, and to end the partitionist mindset which sees the Border as a barrier, whether a desired one or not.
Pollak thinks the centre should get more attention. "It is unglamorous but it works."