SHE was originally from a country in Africa but the pride with which she spoke when talking about her Irish passport was something to behold.
She’d come here through the asylum process but the only details of her background I was really aware of were the death of a brother in some terrible act of violence.
She’d been through the tortuously long process of seeking asylum, the state sponsored money-making racket of the accommodation system, the endless explanations to an endless parade of officials, the insecurity of not knowing whether she would be moved on or not at short notice.
She remembered the careless dismissal of her fears, the callous disregard, the racism, the agony of not knowing whether she’d be able to stay or not. She remembered too the simple kindnesses, the warmth of strangers, the easy acceptance that often surprised her. She remembered picking her child up from school and suddenly being only a parent like all the other parents gathered at the school gate. Her child being her key to the community, to friendships, sports, a nodded hello, the casual recognition, just another parent, just another child. Now she had her passport. Now she was a citizen. Now she had given her child a home. That passport meant so much to her.
I got my first passport in my twenties and it was an Irish one and I’ve never held any other passport. This was about 1987 and I remember it was quite a drawn out experience regarding my parent’s birth certificates. I annoyed my friends, with whom I was going abroad for the first time, telling me to just get a British one as it was easier.
But I was Irish and I wanted an Irish passport. It was important to me. It meant something. It was an official recognition, if you like, of who I was. Not who I wanted to be, just who I was.
Then I read recently the Sky News website running an article under the following headline. British passports are about to get more expensive – here’s who can get an Irish one (and one other way to beat the hike).
This was followed by all the reasons why you might get an Irish passport none of which included being Irish or building your life in Ireland. No, the reasons are, in order, because the Irish passport was recently named the most powerful in the world for perks and entry. Because Ireland is in the EU and, I’m not kidding here, you’d get to skip long queues in EU countries. And, the classiest reason of all, they’re more than £30 cheaper than the British one. There is then a helpful link to an Irish government website detailing those who are eligible.
So, in effect, what we have are British people, primarily English people, availing of an Irish passport because they can and because it will ease their place in queues, be cheaper, and look better. Not because they are in any way Irish. Of course, being Irish is not a closed thing. Only the hopelessly retrograde far right nationalists believe that nonsense. You can be originally from a different continent and culture and still come here and become Irish.
Indeed you make Irish a living, evolving, thing. You make it richer. You can be from outside the island but brought up, as so many of us were, in strong Irish communities in definitively Irish families. You can be a mixture with part of that mixture being Irish. You know, just the usual human stories.
But being English with an Irish passport, and this is nothing against the English, is kind of insulting. People who aren’t Irish discovering an Irishness because it will help them jump a queue or have a bit more travel kudos is something that devalues the passport. I’ll admit fully that I might be romanticising the passport because it meant so much to me when I first got it and it might just be an official document like so many others. I don’t really think it is though. For a lot of us it is a profound recognition of who we are, of what being Irish means to us. I don’t have any answers by the way. I’m not suggesting a GAA test as some kind of obverse to Tebbit’s notorious cricket test. I’m just saying, in a proud Brummie accent despite my Irish upbringing and my twenty six years living here, that English people with Irish passports isn’t anything but shabby.
FOOTER: Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
See More: Irish Citizenship, Passports
