All I Want for Christmas Is an Irish Passport

With a harsh Brexit looming larger by the day, applications for Irish passports have increased exponentially, mainly from people on the UK mainland.

In summer, I got a free membership trial of ancestry.com, mainly with the objective of clarifying the extent of my murky Irish ancestry, clouded by the death of parents, grandparents and older relatives, who could give some direct answers to my questions.

Initial investigation showed that you if you have a parent or grandparent born on Irish soil, then you’re in. Turns out that, like my parents, my grandpas and mas were born in England (or so the census returns seem to suggest). Go back one generation further, though and it’s a different story, with six of eight great-grandparents born on Irish soil. The timings of their migrations seem to indicate that they were most likely scatterlings of the post-famine diaspora. They came over to England and the men predominantly worked as labourers in the local chemical factories (slight worry about the effect this might have on my genes).

I binged (hard ‘g’) claiming Irish nationality and my heart leapt when I read this:

You may be an Irish citizen (or entitled to citizenship) based on when and where you, your parents or your grandparents/great-grandparents were born. (Department of Justice and Equality Website)

However, two criteria clicks on, I got this sinking feeling:

To become an Irish citizen, your great-grandparent’s grandchild (ie your parent) who is of Irish descent must have registered in the Foreign Births Register between the years 1956 and 1986, or if you were born after 1986 they registered before you were born.

To qualify for an Irish passport, through what I’ll grandly call fourth generation dynastic heritage, a parent needs to have seized the initiative to register themselves as a foreign birth sometime in their lives.

Now, during the time of the Falklands War, when rumours of impending conscription of then twenty year olds like myself were running rife, I recall my Mum talking about this and sending me ‘back’ to Ireland. But did she act? I doubt it (fingers crossed though, eh?).

Now I’m aware that there may be many of you who view my readiness to pledge my allegiance elsewhere as treachery of the highest order, but bear with me, there are extenuating circumstances.

My upbringing was at least as steeped in Irish culture as English. Alongside all the usual nursery rhymes, one of the first things I learned by heart was ‘If your Irish, come into the parlour, there’s a welcome there for you.” Songs of Freedom by Theresa Duffy was a favourite on the gramophone, especially when other local Christian churches held ‘processions’; then it was played louder and longer, with the windows wide open. I had a friend in primary school called Martin Collins and when one teacher incessantly referred to him a Michael, I knew the reason for confusion, even at that age. My Mum idolised Collins and would always neatly style my then blacklocked cowlick in his honour, whereas I think my uncompromising Dad was more on slippery Dev’s side and once had my hair shorn so short that I skriked like a baba in the barber’s chair.

It’s nearly a century ago that a country gained independence from a much larger group of nations, which had oppressed its people with tyrannical harshness, bleeding it dry in the process. When Collins and Arthur Griffith led the negotiations for Irish independence, with wily Lloyd George, there was a pre-ordained limit to what they could achieve. Full independence was off the table, dominion status was doable, but not for the whole of Ireland, six counties needed to stay under the umbrella of the union, representatives of which claimed to be defending the rights of a community rooted in migration. Throw in a lot of hard cash, add some nationalistic hubris, along with economic and political self interest, then you can see why things turned out the way they did.

When Ireland tried to negotiate its way out of the union, Collins and Griffith were pragmatists who took what they could: a segregated free state, under dominion status, selling it to their comrades as the best deal that they could realisically get. The die-hards, who would never be satisfied with anything less than a fully free and united Ireland cried betrayal and a civil war ensued that claimed the life of Collins and thousands of others, lasting on and off until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

One positive byproduct of the Brexit kerfuffle has been wider clarification of how this agreement was made effective due to its basis on freedom of mindset. If you live in the North and want to think of yourself as British, then go ahead; if on the other hand, you self-identify your nationality as Irish, then that’s okay too, so let’s get all the guns and bombs and put them beyond use. Free your mind and your weapons will follow. A few deluded extremists aside, this has, up to now, worked. Because mindsets have no borders and the physical one was removed.

In the here and now, we have a country in which nationalists are pushing for independence from a group of nations that they see as so oppressive that they threaten to turn the motherland of this once great empire into a ‘vassal state’. In negotiations, with wily Michel Barnier, there are clear limits to what can be achieved. Ironically, the sticking point may be the same six counties in and from which so much bloodshed flowed in the twentieth century.

Whatever the outcome, any deal will not be enough for the English nationalist extremists, who will take their turn to cry betrayal, but hopefully, the only civil war that will ensue is the one that’s been running in the Tory Party for decades. No more lives will be claimed beyond the one political assassination that has already been perpetrated by an English nationalist, and only careers will be terminated.

But this whole situation throws up certain questions in my mind. If it’s okay for the DUP to assert that they want the same rights as people in the UK, then it follows rest of us in the UK must be entitled to exactly those rights in pretty much the same way. So if they live in an environment within the UK, in which nationality can be determined by mindset and personal choice, surely that should be an option for the rest of us? The implications of this could be vast.

For starters, let’s take Liverpool. In the referendum, the people voted overwhelmingly for remain, Liverpool’s cultural heritage owes at least as much to Ireland as it does to England. Just take a walk down Matthew Street any day of the week and see for yourself.

So can I be the first to call for a referendum about Merseyside seceding from the rest of the UK, remaining in Europe and becoming Irish on the same borderless mindset basis as that of people in the six counties? And to get the ball rolling on this, can I please have an Irish passport?