If leaving the EU has become something of a preoccupation for most of us, in Drummully Polyp it will soon be as unavoidable as popping to the shops.
A quirk of history has landed this pocket of Co Monaghan, in the Irish Republic, on the front line of Brexit.
The area is for practical purposes an enclave within Co Fermanagh, and can only be reached by road via Northern Ireland. Drummully — three miles long, two miles wide and home to a few hundred people connected to the rest of the republic by a stem of land 100m across — had difficulty over access until the European Union and the end of the Troubles eased the inconvenience.
Brexit threatens to make living there a problem again. John Connolly, a farmer and salesman for a packaging company, says: “You don’t know you’re in Northern Ireland or southern Ireland unless you were brought up here.”
Many residents in Drummully struggle to conceive how a hard border could be applied. According to EU law all livestock entering the bloc must be inspected at a border post.
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Without special provisions this could leave Drummully’s farmers stranded.
Mr Connolly does not see how a frontier with customs checks would operate in an area where dozens of single-track roads wend across the border between fields.
Before the Troubles farmers had a 15-mile round trip to the nearby market towns of Clones in Monaghan and Newtownbutler in Fermanagh to clear customs — during the Troubles most roads were blocked or blown up by the army.
“The problem with any border is it’s a dead end
The main road through Drummully changes its name between the A3 and the N54 four times in six miles as it crosses and recrosses the border and the speed limit switches from kilometres to miles per hour.
Tom Conlon, a farmer with land in the north and south, is sanguine about the prospect of a hard border because he cannot imagine how it would work. “The problem with any border is it’s a dead end,” he says.
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The arrival of the single market in 1993 had a profound impact. Padraig McCaffrey, who drives a school bus, says: “You could go where you liked. We thought we were in heaven.”
For Pat Treanor, a Sinn Fein councillor, his challenge, he says, is shaking constituents out of a belief that a hard border would be so impracticable to operate and police that it would not affect them. “Nowhere along the whole length of the border would be more affected. There are eight roads out of this town and five of them would go into Co Fermanagh.”