About five years ago, someone told me they didn’t know what a passport was. My initial reaction was to think that can’t be possible. How do you not even know about the existence of a document that allows you to pass freely from one country to another and that gives you the protection of citizenship?
In the time since, working with refugees and asylum seekers, I have been told this more than once. The traffickers that people pay vast sums of money to in order to escape war, terrorism and poverty recycle the same travel documents over and over, handing it to the trafficked person to present at immigration controls before taking it back again. The passport will belong to someone of the same gender and roughly the same age, but that’s about it. The person may remember the colour of the cover of the document but in most cases won’t know or recall the country of issue, simply that it’s the piece of paper that gets them where they want to go.
Nationality and identity in western Europe are straightforward binary concepts – you are one thing or you are the other. In other parts of the world, identity can, of course, include nationality but it’s just as likely to be grounded in tribal designation, the language you speak or your religious beliefs. This is particularly true in countries where boundaries and borders have shifted over the years as a result of colonialism, battles for independence and historic wars with the neighbours that have resulted in lines being re-drawn on a map.
The Irish Times reported earlier this week that the number of Irish passports being issued in the north has surpassed the number of British passports for the first time on record.
The Passport Office in London has confirmed 48,555 citizens in the north applied for a UK passport in 2020, which was at least 356 fewer than those who opted for an Irish passport the same year (48,911). This number could be more when you factor in the numbers who may have applied in Dublin directly and who did not use the passport express service. Figures for the first two months of this year show the numbers of Irish passports issued in the north is double the number of British ones.
Sinn Féin Senator Niall Ó Donnghaile has been campaigning for a number of years to have an Irish passport office to be opened in Belfast. He said: “It has been clear for many years now that there is a real need for an Irish passport office in the north. This need has been made clear yet again with the publication of these figures…This is simply common sense.”
Common sense indeed. A few years ago, the American Consulate in Belfast held a number of citizen services outreach days in Derry. Handily for me, it coincided with my son needing to renew his American passport and we were able to rock up to the City Hotel with all the documentation, get it checked by officials, pay the fee and know that everything was in order for it to be processed quickly.
There’s no reason the Department of Foreign Affairs couldn’t do the same.
We also saw the publication a few weeks ago of statistics from the Irish passport office indicating a rise in passport applications from what would be viewed as traditionally unionist areas, including Ballymena, Larne and Carrickfergus. Of course, not all of those people will be of an Ulster British identity, but for those who are, it does not seem that there is any existential issue around having an Irish passport. Depending on which you choose, it costs £49 or €20 for a first passport for a child, but if you were ideologically opposed to your child having an Irish passport, you’d find the extra money. Likewise, the right to freedom of movement that comes with an Irish and EU passport is clearly more important for some than having a shiny new blue passport (designed in France and made in Poland).
If that’s where we are and people are making pragmatic choices, then perhaps this is the best reflection of the success of the Good Friday Agreement which respects the rights of those from the north to identify as British, Irish or both. It’s a continuation of a trend that we can date to October 2015 in a joint BBC/RTÉ poll on a united Ireland which showed, for the first time, the majority of people in the north did not identify as British, but as Irish or northern Irish.
The rising numbers of Irish passports in the north could, in fact, be the dawning of a realisation that those of an Ulster British identity who think they might lose something of that identity following a successful border poll have nothing to fear.
It is more than just a piece of paper to get you where you want to go. It’s an evolution of identity that is not binary, but pluralist, inclusive and outward-looking to Europe and the world.
