Some years ago, when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their most murderous, I had a bright idea for the newspaper I was working for. To paint a picture of life in the “badlands” of Co Fermanagh, two of our reporters would spend a few days in the small border town of Lisnaskea.
Our defence correspondent would live with British troops in the fortified army base while I would rent a room above a pub and try to get under the skin of the town’s nationalist community.
It all started so well. On the streets of Lisnaskea I would occasionally glimpse my colleague out on patrol while I went around interviewing locals. I ended each day with a Guinness or two in the bar.
Until, that is, a fellow drinker leant over and, in a low voice, told me a secret. Some of the regulars didn’t believe I was a journalist, he said. They suspected that I was really a British army spy. In less than ten minutes I had downed my pint, packed, paid, put the hire car into first and hit the road at some speed.
I have no regrets about scarpering. The South Fermanagh brigade of the IRA had a brutal reputation. If certain men in that town had been alerted to the regulars’ suspicions, the warm welcome I had experienced might have been, er, curtailed.
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The border area was known as the badlands because the border mattered. This was more than just a dotted line on a map. For nationalists it was a symbol of a disunited Ireland. For loyalists it marked the spot where Ireland stopped and the United Kingdom began.
We will hear a lot more about the Irish border in the coming weeks and months. After Brexit, with Ireland in the EU and the UK out, the border would in theory become a boundary of the EU, with all the customs and passport checks that implies.
A special deal is being negotiated to make sure that Brexit does not damage the current “soft border” between the republic and the north.
This is being watched closely by Nicola Sturgeon. Next week the first minister publishes her ideas for keeping Scotland in the EU single market after Brexit. Her biggest headache is what this means for the Scotland-England border.
“So what is this Irish deal and can it simply be cut and pasted to mainland UK?
If Scotland is in the EU single market and England is not, how can Ms Sturgeon avoid the prospect of a hard border at Gretna Green to check the movement of goods and people? She is expected to propose a similar deal to the one in Ireland, allowing Scotland to retain access to European markets while keeping a soft border with England.
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So what is this Irish deal and can it simply be cut and pasted to mainland UK? The willingness to do a deal on the Irish border has a single motivation: the desire to prevent a return to political murder as a commonplace in the British Isles.
Lest we forget, over a 30-year period leading up to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 more than 3,600 people died as a result of terrorist violence committed by Northern Irish republican and loyalist paramilitaries.
It is a mistake to file the Troubles under history. This is current affairs. Not for nothing is the agreement referred to as “the peace process”. To secure peace we need to sustain a delicate equilibrium of consent and trust. Which is why I am deeply uncomfortable about the way the Scottish government is treating the Irish negotiations.
Ms Sturgeon is not daft. She knows why everyone — London, Dublin, Brussels — is willing to go to extraordinary diplomatic lengths to achieve a soft Irish border. She knows why every EU rule on borders is being broken or bent to reach a deal.
Yet she still feels able to look at this process, painstakingly put together to avoid a return to bloodshed, and say to herself: “I’ll have a piece of that, thank you very much.” It is like watching food parcels being air-dropped to starving people in a besieged town and then saying: “Why can’t we have food parcels too?”
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I have three main doubts about the argument that Scotland deserves an Irish-style deal.
First, I worry that a Scottish desire to ape an Irish solution may make it harder to find that Irish solution. Those negotiating a soft border between Derry and Dundalk should not have to keep looking over their shoulder at Scotland. Dealing with one ages-old national quarrel is a big enough challenge. Two is well-nigh impossible.
Second, I wonder whether the Irish model is as good a fit for Scotland as Ms Sturgeon seems to think it is, particularly on immigration.
Briefings suggest that the Irish government is willing to enforce UK immigration policy at Irish ports and airports, if that is the price for free movement across the border.
One without the other would render useless any new UK controls over immigration because Ireland could be used as a back door for EU citizens looking to settle in the UK.
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Is Ms Sturgeon willing to accept UK immigration policy as the price for retaining Scottish access to the EU single market? I don’t think so.
My third concern is a simple squeamishness. I am appalled that we might want to exploit, for our own gain, a diplomatic crisis with life-or-death consequences.
It feels presumptuous. It feels disrespectful. It feels graceless. It feels wrong. I say this as someone with a deep desire for Scotland to retain access to the EU single market for economic, social, political and cultural reasons.
It is a prize worth winning. But not at any price.