ACTRESS Lydia Leonard has revealed that she has applied for an Irish passport ahead of Britain’s exit from the EU.
The stage star, who is currently playing a Norwegian diplomat in the Tony Award-winning play Oslo, was born in Paris, France and moved to Britain when she was four.
She is eligible for the identity document through her mother, a costume historian who is Irish, she revealed in an interview with the Evening Standard magazine.
“Brexit feels like it is making our country smaller, less relevant and less brave in the world,” she said.
"It felt to me like a signal of retreat, of a desire to shut the drawbridge and face inwards. Which is sort of the total opposite to what culture and the arts need to do, and need to be about.”
Leonard claims she made the decision to opt for an Irish passport once the EU referendum results were in, and says the parallels between the negotiations now facing Britain and those played out on stage in Oslo, which centres on the 1990s Oslo Peace Accords in the Middle East, were obvious.
“Both require incredibly skilled negotiators,” she said.
"The intricacies of negotiations are played out brilliantly in Oslo, but I have less confidence in the skills of the negotiators we have putting through the will of the people in Europe.”
Leonard joins a vast number of people in Britain now applying for Irish passports due to the EU referendum result.
The biggest surge was seen in the first three months after the Brexit referendum, when Ireland saw an 83 per cent rise in applications from Britain and Northern Ireland for passports.
Recent estimations predict that the Irish passport office could process an unprecedented one million passport applications in 2017 if the surge in demand continues.
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