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1 Taxi Driver: He voted for economic reasons, nice man, saw the battlefields from WW1 (as you know many NI people fought there) and he didn't want peace endangered
2: Security Guy: I think voted for NHS money, "sure all politicians lie" but I think had I gotten to him in 2016 I may have convinced him to vote otherwise
3: Another security guy: Into football happy NI team is doing well and racism fought hard, I think for him a little bit of a identity/not sure vote. I think he really felt bad when I told him about problems for us EU furrin's
4: Lawyer from North Belfast, involved in peace work, went to EU many times feels European. Weird he rehashed the "EU bad on Greece" (well EU commission was, yes, but also huge debts and cooking Euro books and EU parliament writes off debts, complex story) and "UK helped Ireland a lot with loans, not EU" (yeah to protect their own banks as well... so... interests involved) but he also felt disappointed so many people think ordinary unionists are bigots, tried to ban the DUP from his cafe.
I found it a bit weird he was still on the "but the EU" should budge side, there we disagreed, but clearly he's also unhappy with the Sea Border and I can understand that too. And he's worried about the peace here, he says unionist "community" (THAT word hah) is very angry, and was there with his son.
Not easy times. I guess us furrin's belong nowhere in a way, but at least everyone talks to us?
JWestland-
I realise this is part of the wider issue, but I'm finding it super difficult to put myself in their shoes and come to the same conclusion. Economy wise we're cutting ourselves out of a huge group with the hopes of negotiating better trade deals with the countries we had deals with. Somehow thinking that the UK alone was in a better position than the EU. NHS was going to get all that EU money is assuming the EU is doing absolutely nothing of value for the UK, unbelievably naive/blinkered. 3 and 4 seem relatively unconvinced so I'm unsure why they'd chose the 'leap into the unknown' over keeping the status quo.
I don't want to be thinking that everyone who voted to leave was basically anti-immigration and has since been hiding behind paper thin alternative arguments (and to be honest, I'm fairly confident that this is not actually the case). But in the last 5 years, I've not seen any solid alternatives. Well, other than people will just lap up whatever headlines are thrown at them and blindly believe it.
I just find it incredibly frustrating that even stepping back and thinking about any of these arguments for a minute, they immediately fall apart. Hence finding it so difficult to accept the cries of "We were lied to!" to try to get some sympathy.
mmccarthy
Oh don't get me wrong I'm not saying that the Unionist Brexit vote was driven by hardening the border. My point was that surely an NI resident Brexit voter would see that either a border would be required, otherwise NI would be a backdoor into the UK, meaning all them forrins would be passing through. If the options were hardening of the NI/ROI border, or a sea border. I'm guessing that hardening the NI/ROI border would be a nice bonus.
Would be interested to hear the opinions of those you've spoken with though. It's difficult to hear opinions from the 'other side' which aren't just angry sub-140 character rants online.