Why I won’t get an Irish passport

Dual citizenship has created a two-tier system since Brexit

Many years ago, I found myself on a press trip to Trieste, that outstandingly beautiful Adriatic city with its late Habsburg feel. As our group checked into the hotel, I was last to present my passport to the concierge, whose face immediately broadened into a smile. I was to be given a special double room with a wide view of the bay, he told me warmly. The reason – I had an Irish passport. ‘We love James Joyce here’, he said, and something to the effect that all Irish people are special to them.

It’s true that the city loves Joyce, and there are signs everywhere to remind visitors of the incomprehensible novelist’s time here. I imagine that the hotel receptionist, being Italian, couldn’t tell from my accent that I am not exactly an Irishman, certainly not in the same way that Joyce was – although perhaps he was also unaware that Joyce, funnily enough, refused to have an Irish passport.

While in Paris in 1930, the novelist told his son Giorgio in a letter that ‘Some days ago I had to renew my passport. The clerk told me he had orders to send people like me to the Irish delegation. But I insisted instead and got a British one.’ A decade later the writer again turned down the offer of an Irish passport, even though it would have made it easier to leave Nazi-occupied France, and stuck to his British document.

I wasn’t aware of this at the time of my visit and, had I known, I obviously wouldn’t have mentioned it: I like showing off how clever I am, but I like large hotel rooms more, and the view really was fantastic.

Any aspiring Irish writer today hoping to hang around Trieste or Paris living in bohemian poverty would feel rather differently, now that an Irish passport guarantees free movement around most of continental Europe. Unsurprising then, that since Brexit huge numbers of British people have applied for the document, alongside similar increases for the passports of other EU states. I have so far not joined them, despite various people telling me that I should.

The reason I had an Irish passport in the first place is mainly down to my mother’s neurosis, one of her concerns being that we might be on board a hijacked plane. If this sounds odd, then hijacking was big in the 1970s, and in the (admittedly unlikely) event of Palestinian militants taking over the plane she figured that an Irish passport would make them more amenable to setting us free. This, at least, was her rather colourful and bizarre explanation, but she did generally feel that being registered as Irish made you more welcome, as the British had rather alienated one or two countries down the years.

As it is, my switch came about because of that part of the world. On another press trip to Israel, the woman at Ben Gurion took one glance at me, looked at my passport, and stuck her country’s stamp on it. I don’t know why, since I seem to remember that the other members of my party, as is the custom, were given a little slip which they could then detach. (I don’t think this was Hibernophobia on her part, since another member of the party had an Irish passport and I think he got a slip, but my memory is vague). A few years later I was visiting an Arab country hostile to Israel, so had to get another passport, and I have stuck with the British one ever since.

One obvious reason for my refusal so far is that I supported Leave, although regretted it almost instantly, and while my opinion on that referendum tends to change every few weeks, I’m still of the view that it was a bad move. In which case, it seems galling for a member of the White Star Line Iceberg Look-out Committee to join the throngs for a lifeboat while everyone else has to take their chances.

I’ve also been rather put off by the many people, among the six million Britons with an Irish grandparent, who have rushed to get a passport and make a song and dance about it on social media.

Many quite openly care nothing about their new ‘homeland’ and are quite naked in stating that they do it out of convenience. If they have any feelings about the country’s heritage, it seems to be the contempt routinely felt by British (and even more so Irish) liberals towards a place that until recently lived in religious darkness.

All of which just seems wrong, but worse still is that we have effectively allowed a system of two-tier citizenship to develop almost without opposition. A while back, Christopher Caldwell wrote about the corrosive effects of dual citizenship, arguing that:

‘Dual citizenship undermines equal citizenship, producing a regime of constitutional haves and have-nots. The dual citizen has, at certain important moments and in certain important contexts, the right to choose the regime under which he lives. He can avoid military conscription, duck taxes, and flee prosecution. When Spain, as coronavirus cases spiked in mid-March, banned all movement outside the home except for designated purposes, one of those purposes was to “return to your habitual place of residence.” 

‘A Spaniard with citizenship in a second country thus had the constitutional privilege of exempting himself from a nationwide lockdown in a way that his fellow Spaniard did not. Such special privileges do not often matter - but when they do, they matter in a life-or-death way.’

One of the many negative outcomes of Britain’s exit from the block is that it has created two types of citizens in Britain: those who are able to access the benefits of the EU, and those who aren’t. Indeed, by its very nature the European Union enables this situation, since an EU passport is more than just a regular document.

I have to admit that I find it a great annoyance waiting in long passport queues while EU citizens whizz past besides us, although I’m not going to tweet that because, duh, you voted for it, you moron. On one occasion last year, I was bored and eavesdropping on a group of young British men travelling and talking about their passports. One had a Dutch grandparent so he was going to get one, while his friends were entirely of British descent; and just like that, there are two separate classes of citizen, except like the reverse of many past systems, it’s foreign heritage that makes you of higher status.

Despite this obvious unfairness, the world is moving towards dual citizenship as the norm, and most recently Germany changed its law on the matter. The reasons for this unstoppable drive towards citizenship inequality are due to that most powerful combination of forces, progressive taboos and elite interests. The system of dual nationality is convenient to the wealthiest members of society, who are the most international and most likely to have two passports, but there are also social prohibitions on questioning the idea of dual loyalties.

This charge has historically been most targeted against Jews, the vast majority of whom support the state of Israel even if they don’t feel it diminishes their sense of Britishness. I can understand why it’s offensive to suggest someone’s religion or ancestry makes them somehow of suspect loyalty, but in the case of people who actually do take out a second passport, of whatever nationality, they clearly do have dual loyalties, by definition.

I’m not sure that dual loyalties are such a bad thing, unless this loyalty is to a regime or political movement which is hostile to Britain, which neither Israel nor Ireland are. As more modern states have increasingly moved to an environment in which war between them is not just unlikely but inconceivable, that question of loyalty matters far less, but it still entails extra benefits not enjoyed by fellow citizens.

I suppose I have dual loyalties, to some extent; if I worked for the Foreign Office, they’d probably be foolish to put me in Dublin, because I take an interest in Ireland’s wellbeing, and would be uncomfortable doing anything detrimental to its interests.

But I don’t plan to move to Ireland, and I don’t see why it’s fair that some people are merely British Citizens, while others get to be British Citizens Plus. Even if the ship doesn’t seem to be in the greatest shape, I’m sticking with it.

I wouldn’t say never, and I would encourage my children to get Irish passports, if they wanted to work or study in the EU (although I’m fairly confident some sort of reciprocal agreement will be made by the time that becomes an issue). And, if I’m totally honest, were I ever able to afford a house in the south of France, then the sweet call of dear old Éireann might prove too emotionally powerful to resist.