Since we’ve waited on his passport to arrive, my son has been travelling on his birth certificate. It’s exciting in one sense, harking back to those days when travel documents were massive, unwieldy things, handwritten in windowless rooms by desk after desk of hard-smoking civil servants, and we did get an illicit Cold War thrill out of withdrawing it from a plastic sleeve at departures each time.
We got his passport documents some time ago, but for weeks they sat on a table in our hall, gathering a thin layer of dust beside some Christmas decorations I wasn’t quite ready to put away.
In our defence, we were still making a full-time job of keeping him alive back then but, unfortunately, our wait-time more than tripled since we contrived to have a baby just as Irish passports, like high-waisted jeans or the measles, emerged from obscurity to become things people want again.
Last week, Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs revealed 76,000 passport applications have come from the UK since January, a 30% increase on the same period in 2018. For the record, I’ve never met an Irish person who has a problem with this. There may be cynical benefits to having an EU passport, but we’ve spent so long charming the British with our passion for thanking bus drivers and wearing shorts if the temperature rises above 14C, we reckon it’s only natural we’ve seduced some of you to the cause.
There’s also the fact that – whisper it – decades of vigorously defending our football team’s policy of granting Irish status to any Englishman with a right foot and a letter from Auntie Moira, leaves us on thin ground, should we object.
The question is, if freedom of movement ends, how will the country react to all these Irish-Brits, like my son, suddenly possessing palpable benefits unknown to their solely British counterparts? How will Britain adapt to having a million or more extra Irish people, gliding through airport queues like some special class of UK/EU super-citizen?
Luckily, when the boy’s passport finally arrived, all thought of it as a lubricant for international travel went by the wayside since baby passports are – and I cannot stress this enough – just about the most adorable thing on earth. His ludicrous, legally recognised baby face; his tiny square head, fitting almost perfectly the shape and size of the box in which it’s contained; best of all, the fact that he will travel with this smiley ball of dough as his photo until he is very nearly six years old.
Like me, my son now has a British birth certificate and an Irish passport. I’m content that he can choose for himself whichever combo of those identities feels right to him later in life. So long, of course, as he remembers to thank his bus driver. Some things are non-negotiable.
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
