Passports, Wedding Bells and Wallabies

My first Irish passport arrived on the January day that Prime Minister May stood up in the House of Commons to announce the Bill that would trigger Article 50. Pretty impressive timing, you might think, but if anything I was a bit behind the curve. Wait… a bit? I was so far behind that in the movie version I would be standing in the street trying to hail another curve and telling it not to lose sight of the one in front.

In the days immediately after the EU Referendum in June 2016 – days when I saw neighbours actually crying in the street – there was such a rush for Irish passports that Post Offices here in Northern Ireland were reported to have run out of application forms. Even Ian Paisley MP, a prominent member of the Leave campaigning Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, was urging anyone who qualified to apply, as much as to say ‘we didn’t really expect you to buy that UK out stuff…’

And of course this being Northern Ireland, an administrative region of the United Kingdom, whose citizens are recognised in the Republic of Ireland’s constitution ‘by entitlement and birthright’ to be part of the Irish Nation, just about everyone qualified.

That wasn’t a curve I was following, that was a tidal wave. In actual fact my own Irish passport application had by that stage been sitting in a drawer in my desk for nearly three years – since back in the days when the Referendum was still a twinkle in one man’s slightly crazedlooking eye. I’d picked it up, if I remember correctly, ahead of a planned trip to the USA. Visas are easier, I was always told, with an Irish passport, so I was surprised recently to hear someone state the exact opposite, that many people here whose first choice would be an Irish passport took out a UK one specifically for transatlantic trips.

In the days immediately after the EU Referendum in June 2016 […] there was such a rush for Irish passports that Post Offices here in Northern Ireland were reported to have run out of application forms.

Which for some reason reminds me of one of those recurrent arguments my brothers and I used to have in the back seat of the family car on long journeys about whether cows lying down in a field was a good sign or a bad sign. I can’t remember which of my exasperated parents settled that in the end by telling us that if the cows’ legs were in the air it was definitely a bad sign.

Northern Ireland has always been, to borrow the title of Dervla Murphy’s 1978 book, A Place Apart. Even before Partition in 1921 – even before the Plantation 300 years earlier – Murphy writes, Northerners were ‘an anomalous people’, out of step with the rest of Europe – the rest of Ireland for that matter.

The passport question has always been a vexed one here in Northern Ireland.

Fast forward forty years and the five-and-a half-thousand square miles loosely corralled by the (for now) invisible border – the ‘Fourth Green Field’ of sentimental Irish balladry – is, rather unsentimentally, the only part of these islands where you cannot marry the person you love if that person happens to be of the same sex as you.

 In September 2015 as part of Belfast’s Culture Night I performed an open-air ‘wedding ceremony’ between two men who clearly loved each other very much. While it was a performance – though, let’s be honest, what wedding isn’t? – I went to the trouble of having myself ordained in advance. Well, I say ‘trouble’: my online ordination took as long as it took the American company – sorry church – to verify my bank details: ‘If this page does not refresh in thirty seconds… twenty-nine, twenty-eight…’ Ping! – There it was, there I was, upon the recommendation of the church board, obviously hastily convened, licensed to conduct marriages in forty-three out of fifty states and – for one night only – on the front steps of Belfast’s Merchant Hotel. Actually those Americans would have been the ideal people to help clear last June’s Irish passport backlog.

I haven’t broken the news yet to my children, by the way, that because of how I am perceived they are Protestant too. I fear the effect, coming on top of Brexit, would be like a stretched elastic band suddenly snapping back. In common with many children here they could parse their identity almost before they could handle a knife and fork: first and foremost of course they were blessed with being from Belfast, their mummy, though, was from Cork, so that made them Irish, their passports had a crown on them, so that made them British, and they walked under the blue sign with the pretty circle of golden stars at airports, so that made them European.

Sometime in the early 2000s – in advance of the Nice Treaty, as I recall, and how Season 1 that now sounds – I was asked by the British Council in Brussels to contribute to a book of essays on the subject of identity. Another writer friend who had been asked to contribute too said that for a Northern Irish person this was a bit like someone turning up on your doorstep with a fistful of banknotes asking if you had any old rope. Oh, we were laughing then all right.

I met that same friend shortly after the Brexit result. He told me, grim-faced, that he was finished with this place. Northern Ireland had only ever been tolerable if it was part of something larger, a complex of interlocking relationships. If it was to be stuck now out in the Atlantic, with a border once more between it and the rest of the island, and – who knows? – maybe an independent Scotland to the east of it, it would be like a lost jigsaw piece, worse, it would be like a piece in want of a jigsaw to belong to.

A couple of months ago I was at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast for a double-bill of music-plays by Conor Mitchell, artistic director of a new music-theatre collective, the Belfast Ensemble. The plays – The Habsburg Tragedies Parts 1 & 2, a verse-cycle followed by a melodrama – focused, respectively, on Catherine of Aragon and her sister Joanna of Castile, aka Juana the Mad, and were, their writer says, explicitly conceived of as a way to talk about Europe.

Northern Ireland had only ever been tolerable if it was part of something larger, a complex of interlocking relationships. If it was to be stuck now out in the Atlantic, […] it would be like a piece in want of a jigsaw to belong to.

Mitchell is as concerned as the rest of us about what the future holds. As he says, if we aren’t able in future to send a Marks and Spencer’s van from Belfast to Dublin without rigorous customs checks how on earth are we going to bring Danish State Opera here? Theatre in Northern Ireland, he says, has evolved like a marsupial, to which I am tempted to add, only theatre?

After the play I got talking to a couple of people who had driven up from Dublin for the show, and who had – they took them out and showed them to me – brought their passports, just in case they were stopped at the border. The third member of their group raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘It hasn’t come to that’, she said then a little less certainly added, ‘and with a bit of luck it never will.’

Brexit and how to respond to it has made its way on to the agenda of the latest round of crisis talks here, our two largest parties, and former coalition partners, Sinn Fein and the DUP, having campaigned on opposite sides in the Referendum, which for the record ended up with 56 per cent of those Northern Irish voters who turned out voting to remain.

Between you and me I have always thought that London and Dublin were secretly in love.

And yet, as Dervla Murphy observed forty years ago, people here, whatever their religion or voting habits, have more in common with each other than they recognise or allow – much, much more than they have with their counterparts in either Dublin or London. Between you and me I have always thought that London and Dublin were secretly in love. Oh, of course, they had their big tiff way back when, but each of them I think recognises something of themselves in the other – architecturally, temperamentally – and each of them looks north with a mixture of despair and distaste.

One of the great attractions of being in Europe for me was that you didn’t have to go through either of those centres to make connections. The Europe I felt I belonged to was not so much the Europe of the great capitals – though I could live in any of them quite happily thank you – as the Europe of provincial industrial cities, Essen, Poznan, Debrecen, even some that didn’t end in ‘n’. It was the difference between being peripheral and being on some trans-Europe version of the Paris Périphérique: the constant traffic was what attracted me, the unfettered movement of ideas and people. And then the brakes went on.

Another friend rang me just before I began work on this essay. A Remainer, and native Londoner, he has brought up his family in County Fermanagh, which has border – future obduracy as yet undetermined – on three sides. ‘Have I done the right thing?’ he asked, ‘living here?’ I wanted to say something reassuring, except he was the very person I had been intending to phone for reassurance if all this uncertainty got too much to me, which at that moment and for a few days afterwards, I am bound to say, it very nearly did.

It was the difference between being peripheral and being on some trans-Europe version of the Paris Périphérique.

And then out of the blue, I received an invitation, to the wedding of two more friends – neither of them as it happens born in Northern Ireland either – an already happy couple who had decided to get married after the passing of the Article Fifty Bill announced the day my Irish passport arrived.

‘I am the second Brexit bride I know’, the woman told me (when I had finished telling her that if she wanted to get married in 43 of the 50 States I was licensed to oblige), and she named someone else of our acquaintance who had decided exactly the same thing at exactly the same time and – it seems no great stretch to deduce – for exactly the same reason, a sense that as one union is sundered in an atmosphere of simmering hostility another must be cemented with love.

I don’t know if it is necessarily a commitment to this place as well as to one another – though I sincerely hope it is. But having said that I don’t know either whether my getting round to taking the Irish passport application from my desk drawer at the beginning of this year was the simple piece of pre-spring cleaning I have been passing it off as, or something more ambiguous, the bipedal equivalent of a bovine stretch on the grass, or whether finally it is a sign that in my own subconscious I fear that post-Brexit this whole Fourth Green field might indeed be about to go seriously hooves up.