Why are 600,000 here holding British passports?
Bruce Arnold, The Irish Independent, Monday, 9 October 2000

I have been puzzling, over the past week, about a statistic which I
find hard to believe, even harder to explain. It is this: Within the
Republic of Ireland there are between 500,000 and 600,000 men and
women who hold British passports.

The statistic derives from the British Embassy, and is construed from
the fact that each year, on average, 70,000 passports are either
renewed, changed, or issued, to people resident in the Republic of
Ireland. The life of a British passport is ten years, giving a
multiple for the overall result from the total turnover.

It is not an active list on which the Embassy relies. No overall
record is kept by the British Embassy of all the passports, the
ownership of the first of which could go back for many decades. The
Embassy works on current requirements, not on history. But the
regular, on going nature of the demand is a reliable and valid
expression of the reality. And it means that around 15pc of the
population of this independent, sovereign, Irish State see themselves
as "British".

Since only 2pc-3pc of the population of the Republic is Protestant, a
huge number of those holding British passports are Catholic. Since
you cannot have a passport until you are sixteen, and cannot get a
British one if Irish born in Ireland after 1949, the overwhelming
majority of these British passport-holders are voters. We have to
allow, in this analysis, for extreme and eccentric cases, where
nationalists or republicans hold British passports for "political"
reasons, as others might hold them for commercial or economic
reasons.

But there still remain huge numbers who, by definition, belong to
this remarkably substantial and on-going "minority" in the State, who
favour "Britishness" as part of their make-up.

I present the main statistic in the context of current issues that
are of importance. These concern the Irish Government and its
policies in the South over the thorny question of minority status.
They also concern the Irish Government and its policies over Northern
Ireland.

Irish Government policy, in this particular field, is largely shaped
at present by Martin Mansergh, the Taoiseach's Special Advisor. He
has not been shy in putting forward his views, which in summary try
to suggest that the Republic of Ireland has a kind of seamless
political, social and religious homogeneity, with everyone "loyal" to
the State because they are part of the State. As a result, we have no
parallel needs to those in Northern Ireland for special terms
recognising minorities in this part of the country.

He writes often and widely on this and its related arguments. Indeed,
so much does he seek this "political publicity" that one might be
excused for thinking he will perhaps be a Fianna Fáil candidate in
the next election, standing possibly in "Mansergh Country" in the
west midlands, and presenting more on the hustings of this quite
trite and user-friendly material.

It is clever stuff. He is not averse to loading the arguments he
makes with references to British "attempts over centuries to hobble
this nation" (Church of Ireland Gazette, 29 September, 2000). At the
same time he dismisses the past 80 years with their bitter and
painful "decontamination" of the "real" Ireland from British, Anglo-
Irish, Protestant and most notably of all, Unionist, culture. That,
he claims, is all over. Ireland mercifully now has "a liberal and
pluralist society, mercifully free of sectarian rancour, violence or
segregation". And he sees it as unified, and indeed seamless.

He is wrong in what he claims. He uses the very recent Irish Celtic
Tiger enlightenment, which has been largely promoted by the collapse
of the Roman Catholic Church's authority, and the rise of a new God,
that of materialism and wealth, in order to dismiss any claim from
the British minority in the Republic that recognition of their needs
is important. In an uneven way, the Irish Government is obsessively
concerned to raise the profile of the Northern Ireland Nationalist
and republican minority, and its needs, while making no effort at all
to address the parallel needs in the South.

Indeed, Martin Mansergh, in much more detailed correspondence with
the Reform Movement (of which I am a patron), has teased out, in the
context of current Government policy though speaking personally, this
issue of minority status. Undoubtedly unaware of the 500,000-plus
holders of British passports in the Republic of Ireland, he dismisses
the very idea of "a British minority" in the South. He denies the
role of Southern Protestants in a Northern Ireland context, in giving
support to the Northern Protestants. And he asserts that Protestants
in the South have no interest in supporting any British or Unionist
identity in the Republic, and nothing to gain from it. He goes even
further in suggesting that, where some of these views emerge they are
supposedly Northern Ireland in their inspiration.

Most notably of all, perhaps, he claims "The Government is not
persuaded that there is, in the meaning of the Convention (on the
Protection of National Minorities) any obvious identifiable group of
its citizens, that by reason of clearly distinguishable ethnic,
linguistic or religious criteria would at the present time constitute
a national minority."

No criterion in the world is more clear-cut or compelling than the
ownership of a passport. Yet this has not only been completely
ignored, it has been denied. Mansergh claims that no "self-respecting
sovereign Government is going to permit...any of its citizens to hold
an allegiance at the same time to another country." Yet half a
million do. They demonstrate that the conditions on dual citizenship
in Northern Ireland need to be replicated down here unless we
continue living with a ridiculous piece of hypocrisy.

Having written for years along lines completely contradictory to
those so forcefully and wrong-headedly pursued by Martin Mansergh, I
now find myself distressed at how many generalisations seem to be
founded on so little evidence. Leaving aside how big or how small
the "British" the "Unionist" the "Protestant" and the "Anglo-Irish"
in the political sense traditions may be, there is first of all the
existence of this broad "minority" in our society, and then the
question of its needs.

Whether "personal" or related to Government policy, the Taoiseach's
advisor espouses views which are fully represented in Government
policy. In one letter, the most strongly-worded of all (already
quoted from above), they are stated as such. Under the present
Government, we recognise no British minority in the Republic,
research no British need for identity, discover no desire to
ameliorate Unionists' fears about our society, and we do little to
encourage greater Unionist acceptance of our point of view. And all
this is carried forward in the absence of one of the most basic
pieces of research. Passport ownership has been entirely overlooked.

The Taoiseach has an unbending view of Patten, while his view on
decommissioning is endlessly flexible and weak. He talks in riddles
about Sinn Féin and its relationship with the Provisional IRA,
thereby leaving open Fianna Fáil's future liaison in power with that
party.

He has made far too little effort to reach out towards the concept
and the reality of an all-islands context for better relations,
almost certainly, or so I suspect, because of the greater degree
of "Britishness" which this would inject into the future of all of
us.

It does not suit Martin Mansergh, any more than it suits Bertie Ahern
or the Government as a whole, to envisage a sizable minority in the
Republic of Ireland who voted for the Good Friday Agreement, not
because they were Irish, but because it offered peace and an
exclusive pursuit of democratic politics free of the bomb and the
gun.

Many of those voters wanted the South to embrace the Unionist demands
for the same broad reason, of getting the peace made permanent but at
the same time fair.

These supporters accepted that the amendment of Articles 2 and 3 was
a de jure and de facto recognition of Northern Ireland's majority
wish. They accepted that the Northern majority wanted to remain
within the United Kingdom, and they had no wish to coerce them into
an all-Ireland State.

Since 15pc of those who voted, in the South, on the Good Friday
Agreement, were also part of the United Kingdom, this diversity of
interpretation becomes more understandable than the ludicrous concept
of a "seamless society."

Both Martin Mansergh and his team in the Taoiseach's office need to
get back to the drawing-board as a matter of urgency, and do a bit
more practical research.

It may be too late. David Trimble has already suffered attack,
humiliation, endless difficulty in sustaining his position, and now
may be toppled from the leadership of his party, bringing down the
Agreement and the Assembly. A good part of the blame for this will
reside with the Government down here. It is glib and smug about the
society we display towards Northern Ireland, strident in its demands
over Northern Ireland policing. Above all, it is sanctimonious about
the pure, unsullied, harmonious society in the South that recognises
no other face than its own.