Irish citizenship — a symbol of ancestry, community and culture, or merely one of pragmatism? DR MARC SCULLY considers the situation
SEPTEMBER’S Ireland-England Nations League match was notable for the number of players wearing English shirts who are eligible for Irish passports. As well as goalscorers Declan Rice and Jack Grealish, and interim manager Lee Carsley, Harry Kane & Harry Maguire both qualify through their paternal ancestry. More broadly, Jude Bellingham and Conor Gallagher have both successfully applied for Irish passports, thus facilitating their careers in Spain’s La Liga, as EU citizens.
Bellingham and Gallagher are not alone among British-born people who have opted for Irish passports for employment and travel through the EU since Brexit. Figures from the Irish passport office show that there were 130,000 applications from Great Britain in 2022: this is triple the figure that would normally have applied per year before Brexit.
This rise in applications has generally been characterised as a pragmatic response by British people of Irish descent. On both sides of the Irish Sea, applicants are described as availing of the ‘Granny rule’; in Britain in particular, Irish citizenship is portrayed as a quirky loophole for those fortunate enough to have Irish ancestry.
Absent in these accounts is a willingness to take second and third generation Irish identity seriously. As readers of the Irish Post will know, that those of Irish descent in Britain may identify primarily, or at least somewhat, as Irish, is not a new, Brexit-driven phenomenon. What may be new, is the formal claim to Irishness that comes with a passport application. Until now, for many Irish in Britain, Irishness has been about family and community, but not necessarily about their relationship with the Irish state, or even with contemporary Ireland.
To find out more about this new aspect to Irishness in Britain, I held a series of interviews and focus groups with people who had applied for Irish passports in the context of Brexit. Within these, there were roughly two cohorts: those who already had a strong sense of Irish identity, and for whom the passport was a new strand of this; and those who were exploring their Irishness for the first time, within the bureaucratic process of applying for citizenship.
Within the latter group, their stories of that process were characterised by effortfulness: not just the effort of gathering the necessary documents, but the effort they were putting in to acquire knowledge of Irish history and culture. They were engaging in personal projects of reading Irish media, studying Irish history, and attempting to learn some of the Irish language. As there is no requirement to pass a knowledge test to obtain Irish citizenship, this is interesting. Possibly, it is a way for applicants to demonstrate, to themselves as much as anyone else, their genuine commitment to their ‘new’ nation, and to defend against accusations of merely wanting a passport for pragmatic reasons.
For those with pre-existing strong Irish family links, applying for an Irish passport prompted re-engaging with Irish community activities as well as a determination to more thoroughly acquaint themselves with contemporary Ireland: some participants wished to update the image of Ireland they retained from childhood visits. These participants also spoke of a sense of relief in no longer needing to ‘officially’ represent themselves as British: that an Irish passport allowed them to represent themselves as they felt they ‘naturally’ were.
Irish passports in Britain, therefore, are not merely a pragmatic way of accessing free movement throughout the EU. They are documents invested with psychological meaning associated with ancestry, family and community, as well as a prompt for people to re-evaluate what it means to them to be Irish in a contemporary context.
Dr Marc Scully is a Lecturer in Psychology at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. He has a long-standing research interest in identity issues in the Irish diaspora, particularly the Irish in Britain. His recently published article in Political Psychology, entitled ‘“I feel I should put that work in: Discourses of effortfulness and essentialism among post-Brexit applicants for Irish citizenship’ is available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.13026
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