Politics

No, it’s not “unfair” that Northern Irish people can be EU citizens post-Brexit

While I empathise with many in Britain who voted to Remain and who are now resentful of losing their EU citizenship, to make Northern Ireland the object of this ire is deeply misguided

December 08, 2017
A Sinn Fein billboard calling for 'No Hard Border' on display in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo: PA
A Sinn Fein billboard calling for 'No Hard Border' on display in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo: PA

After much agonising over the Irish question, a last-minute deal has been finally cobbled together in order to progress Brexit talks to the next stage.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May, and her Irish counterpart Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, have agreed on a set of principles which they hope will finally answer some of the uncertainty about the future of Northern Ireland once the UK leaves the EU.

We are told that there will be no hard border on the island of Ireland (pleasing the government in the south and the nationalist community in the north) but also no regulatory divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK (pleasing the Conservatives’ pact partners in the DUP).

Quite how these two apparently contradictory measures will be squared is still ambiguous—but it appears that the promise is enough to placate both sides for the time being at least in order to allow talks to progress.

However, a clearer and more tangible, if somewhat overlooked, development for Northern Ireland in today’s announcement is that people born there will remain entitled to hold an Irish passport if they wish—as was already guaranteed to them under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement—and that, by extension this will allow them to retain EU citizenship.

The agreement published this morning states: “The people of Northern Ireland who are Irish citizens will continue to enjoy rights as EU citizens, including where they reside in Northern Ireland.”

This development is far from surprising as the Irish government, British government and the EU have all pledged variations of this over the course of the last year before today’s commitment.

What has been surprising has been the backlash with which the news has been met by some in Britain.

Journalist James O’Brien responded by tweeting: “British children born in Belfast will have more rights and freedoms than British children born in Birmingham. I’m happy for them but that’s hardly fair.”

Labour MP Steve Reed was quick to tweet: “How is it fair that NI citizens keep EU citizenship but my constituents in Croydon North don’t. Should apply to whole UK.”

A similar raft of grumblings had emerged earlier this week when a draft deal was leaked on Monday which mooted a special status for Northern Ireland post-Brexit.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan suggested that if a special deal was possible for Northern Ireland, then London could be entitled to something similar.

The SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon echoed his comments suggesting that if Northern Ireland could get a special deal there was “no good practical reason” why other parts of the UK couldn’t also.

The glib response, of course, is that neither Croydon North, Birmingham, London or Scotland were invaded and occupied by another country for hundreds of years, then partitioned and engulfed in a civil war for much of the twentieth century in which 3,500 people died before the conflict was ended through a peace treaty co-signed by another EU country.

Nothing to be envied

In reality, Northern Ireland’s circumstances will draw envy from few who have a nuanced understanding of its troubled past and complex present.

The region’s constitutional status has been the subject of intense violence and civil disorder over the course of the last fifty years. That violence only ended recently, with the signing of a peace treaty which guaranteed people in Northern Ireland the birthright to identify as Irish.

To have cut off this right to identify as Irish through Brexit by creating a second tier of citizenship whereby people could be Irish, but not EU, citizens would have created a clear difference between them and people in the Republic of Ireland—and thereby unsettled the arrangements which had taken decades to agree.

Unfortunately, this appears to be lost on many people in England, Scotland and Wales, who are instead misrepresenting the unique constitutional status of Northern Ireland as something to be envied and something which they are somehow losing out on.

While I empathise with many in Britain who voted to Remain and who are now resentful of losing their EU citizenship, to make Northern Ireland the object of this ire is deeply misguided. To play ignorant of Northern Ireland’s troubled past in order to make short term political capital out of Brexit talks for places like Birmingham or Croydon is a cheap and cynical move.

A split society?

It is also worth noting that in reality this concession will not apply to all of Northern Ireland. Most people in the region chose their passport on the basis of their affiliation along the traditional Catholic-nationalist v Protestant-unionist axis, with Catholics tending to hold Irish passports while Protestants tend to hold British ones.

There will be some ardent Remainers in the Protestant community who will switch to having an Irish passport in order to retain links to the EU, but it is likely that more Catholics than Protestants will benefit from the measure.

This is likely to create a concerning situation where Northern Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant communities will have different rights to visit or work in EU nations, an unhelpful additional layer of ‘othering’ in our already divided society.

Therefore, for Northern Irish people to retain the right to chose EU citizenship is not as straightforward as it may first appear to other people in the UK.

Furthermore, to present Northern Ireland as somehow being a post-Brexit bastion of citizens’ rights which those in England, Scotland and Wales will envy is also wilful ignorance of the many human rights abuses which occur here which would never be tolerated anywhere else in the UK.

After the UK leaves the EU, some of us may continue to be EU citizens by holding Irish passports but we will also continue to be arrested and face life in prison for ‘committing’ abortions and refused the right to marry our same-sex partners.

Politicians elsewhere in the UK have long turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Northern Ireland on the grounds that our history makes us a special case. To suddenly take umbrage with rights here on one of the few occasions when it advantages us is appalling hypocrisy.

A political football

Over the last two years Northern Ireland has been used as a political football by Leave campaigners keen to gloss over the region in order to push Brexit through. Sadly, it seems that Remainers are now seeking to use the same tactics for the opposite aim.

But just as the Leave campaign were wrong to do so, Remainers must now also be called out in the same way. Only a nuanced and sensitive understanding of Northern Ireland will aide people on both islands.

Misleading and untrue narratives about the region getting an unfair advantage or extra ‘rights’ cannot be allowed to take hold.