Six months ago I became a cross-Border body. I took leave of absence from my journalist's job in Dublin and moved to Armagh to set up a new centre at the Queen's University outreach campus, to research and develop cross-Border co-operation. Three months later the Irish and British governments also chose Armagh to locate the secretariat of the North-South Ministerial Council, which would oversee the cross-Border implementation bodies and the ministerial councils set up under the Belfast Agreement.

Whatever the political difficulties now facing those cross-Border arrangements, it soon became clear to me, as a temporary migrant from the Republic to the North, that as far as the rules and regulations governing the business of ordinary living are concerned, Northern Ireland sometimes seems as foreign a place as the remotest corner of Portugal or Greece. It is the everyday obstacles which are the most irritating: things like banking and insurance, phones and health services. This became apparent on my first day, when I tried to arrange for my wife back in Dublin to receive a monthly payment from my northern salary cheque to cover some household bills.

I had imagined, in my naivety, that since my bank in Dublin was the Bank of Ireland, which had a branch a hundred yards from my new office in Armagh, this would be a relatively straightforward business. I was in for an unpleasant surprise: because of the changing currency differentials between sterling and the punt, it is not possible to transfer money simply and cheaply, even within the same bank, across the Border to the Republic. To my bemusement, I found I could debit my Dublin account through the use of my southern cash card, but I could not make the reverse transaction to credit either my or my wife's southern account. To do that on a regular basis would require a bank draft to be sent to Dublin in punts at a cost of £6 per transaction.

If cross-Border banking was difficult, the phone system was a nightmare. I had a foretaste of what was to come when I set out to buy a mobile phone. Understandably, I wanted one which was functional in both Irish jurisdictions, with a croaming (i.e., extra-territorial) charge which was not too exorbitant for my occasional visits to the Republic. The mass of often conflicting information from Eircom, BT, Orange and Cable and Wireless was baffling. In the end my secretary spent the best part of two days constructing a complicated matrix of the four companies' different line rentals, Northern Ireland peak and off-peak calls, UK peak and off-peak calls, North-South peak and off-peak calls, Republic peak and off-peak calls, and mobile to mobile calls, with different charges for making and receiving calls in each category.

Even at the end of this task, it was unclear which company was the most competitive for someone treating the island of Ireland as one unit. It was not helped by the extraordinary ignorance of some of the people giving out information: we were told by one BT employee, for example, that there would be a bar on calls to the Republic for one to three months after getting a BT phone until a customer's credit rating was approved! Getting a mobile was only the beginning of my purgatory by phone. Because the Centre for Cross Border Studies, as its name suggests, is in the business of communication across the Irish Border, it was important that the centre's stationery and literature carried the phone code from the Republic. The problem here is that UK phone codes are in the process of changing. Three BT international operators - all of them with English accents - gave me different codes to phone Northern Ireland from the Republic under the new system. In despair, I phoned an Eircom international operator in Dublin. Did he know the new code from the Republic to the North? Not only did he not know, he was genuinely annoyed that anyone should expect him to. Nobody in Eircom has any idea about the new numbers in Northern Ireland, he said, not bothering to keep the irritation out of his voice. "I've no new codes, all I've got is the present 08 code."

Finally I tracked down a nice young man called Paul on the BT Northern Ireland service desk. He informed me that, up to next September, there are two parallel numbers for phoning Northern Ireland from the Republic (048 and 004428) plus the new northern codes, as well as the current 08 with the old northern codes. I hope this has not confused the average Republic reader of this newspaper too much; as a Northerner who has been making cross-Border phone calls regularly for the past 30 years, it confused me entirely.

My next battle was to obtain car insurance. The first problem was that, in this age of supposedly seamless labour mobility across EU borders, the computer kept getting snagged on the problem of my having just moved to live in Northern Ireland from another European jurisdiction. When this was finally resolved, there was the difficulty of putting my wife on the insurance for her visits to the North. Despite her 25 years of driving experience in the Republic, she would have to be categorised as a "novice" - and nearly £300 would be added to the cost. The only way this ridiculous extra charge could be reduced would be for her to lie about her high-status professional job and pretend to be a housewife, and then pass a British driving test.

I also have to make sure that my children don't get sick get sick when they visit me in Armagh. An acquaintance who works in Derry, but lives just over the Border in Donegal, tells of rushing his 14 year old son, in extreme pain with a burst appendix, to the main Derry hospital, only to be informed that he would have to sign an undertaking to pay A form for an operation which would cost £2800.

This man is outraged that he pays the same taxes and the same national insurance as his fellow workers in Northern Ireland, yet is treated as some class of alien when his child is seriously ill. He also points out, with some bemusement, that his place of residence does not stop the North's Department of Health and Social Services paying his family a Northern children's allowance for the same child.

Such bureaucratic barriers to everyday interchange between the two Irish jurisdictions are going to become even more problematic as increasing numbers of people move across the Border to work. For whatever the state of politics in the North, the Celtic Tiger economy and its attendant labour shortages are going to ensure that this will be a growing trend. Other multinationals are already looking at Xerox's experience in Dundalk. The availability of workers from Northern Ireland was one of the carrots which brought the huge document equipment company to the Co Louth town. Xerox aims to have a quarter of its 2,100-strong workforce from across the Border by the end of 2003.

At the other end of the Border, the trend is the same. Well-informed local observers estimate that nearly 500 people from Derry and Strabane cross the Border to work in Donegal every day, with over 1,000 making the daily trip in the opposite direction. This is cross-Border co-operation at its most humdrum, human and necessary. Is it beyond the wit of financial institutions, telephone companies and health boards to start clearing the bureaucratic minefields which continue to litter this now largely peaceful territory?

Andy Pollak is director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, Armagh