‘Irish people living in Great Britain are waking up today to a new reality. Their long-cherished rights of free movement have been threatened by this vote.’
by Nick Royle
They were just jokes at the start of the campaign, throwaway one-liners designed to cause a bit of a fuss on social media.
They came from young Irish professionals in Britain wondering aloud whether they should apply for a UK passport. “Just in case!’ accompanied by a smiley face or three.
The mood changed a week or two ago.
As the polls tightened, reality started to hit for young Irish people who have become conditioned to the right to live and work wherever they wished across Europe.
On a flight to Dublin last week, I randomly met an old friend who was coming back for a college reunion via England from his base in Luxembourg.
“And I’ve also got to go to the passport office to sort out my Irish passport. I may need it for work,” he said.
Born in Belfast to two Irish citizens, he held a UK passport simply because it was easier for him to apply for than an Irish passport.
But, under the terms of his contract, he has to be a citizen of a European Union country to work for his employer, the European Commission.
So he was just making sure.
He’s not alone. Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs says that requests from adults born north of the border for first-time Irish passports rose 14% to 12,159 in 2015.
Moreover, many Britain-based EU citizens have applied for UK passports to ensure their right to remain in the country. 11% of new grants of citizenship in 2015 were from EU nationals, up from 4% in 2011.
A new reality
Irish people living in Great Britain are waking up today to a new reality. Their long-cherished rights of free movement have been threatened by this vote.
Irish people have the same rights to live, work and vote in the United Kingdom as UK citizens, regardless of this referendum, but this result shows how easily things can change, how laws and rights they thought were guaranteed can be swept away by the will of the people or rabble-rousers in Parliament.
The Irish people worrying about the vote on my social media feeds are mostly university-educated, live in London and work in law, the media, charities or the civil service.
They are not the Irish immigrants to Britain of the 1950s or the 1980s, rural or working-class people who got on the boat to Holyhead to escape the recession back home.
The England they live in is an agreeable world of flat whites, unforced multiculturalism and the Guardian on Saturday. They don’t really see those heartlands of the North that have voted so overwhelmingly for Brexit.
They perhaps don’t understand their reality of zero-hour contracts, of minimum wage jobs in Sports Direct, and the disconnect they feel from Westminster politics.
They have little concept of the punitive nature of welfare provision in the UK, where benefits are taken off needy families with chaotic lives for weeks because a claimant fails to make an appointment with the Job Centre on time.
Because, despite the ugly rhetoric of the Leave campaign, this vote is not really about immigrants.
It is a vote of desperate people, locked out of the South East and London bubble, with no job security and no chance of getting on the housing ladder.
But the ease with which the Leave side have exploited these feelings of helplessness, made the debate about migration instead of the structural failings of the housing market and the UK economy, means Irish people feel more unwelcome in Britain this morning than at any time since the height of the Troubles.
And those smiley faces are long gone.
Nick Royle is a journalist from Warrington, who spent 23 years living in Dublin before moving to London in January 2016. He writes for Setanta Sports in Ireland and BBC Sport in the United Kingdom.
