Northerners applying for Irish passports can now put their birthplace as Londonderry – so long as they don’t get carried away
SO DERRY Protestants can now have the satisfaction of entering their birthplace as “Londonderry” – rather than Derry – when they apply for an Irish passport. The big-hearted gesture came from Micheál Martin, Minister for Foreign Affairs, as a way of marking the 11th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement: it was, he said, “simply an attempt to accommodate the different traditions on this island”. Apparently, there had been a series of representations from northerners who were keen to have their British identity acknowledged. Slipping from emollient largesse to terse legalese, Martin hastened to add that “this decision carries no implications as regards the official or legal title of any political or geographic entity.” So the message to unionists is: okay, we’ll let you call it Londonderry if you really, really want to, but it’s still called Derry as far as we’re concerned. Don’t get carried away now.
All the same, initial reaction has been largely positive. The move has been reported around the world as a “symbolically significant” concession to the city’s Protestant community. Even Derry DUP MLA Gregory Campbell acknowledged it as a positive step, an abandonment of an “exclusionist nationalist agenda” in favour of “new political realities”. “Whilst some who represent nationalists continue their paranoid and manic drive to obliterate the term Londonderry from everyday usage,” he said, “the Government which they ascribe loyalty to has abandoned attempting to force the inaccurate and offensive term on those who do not wish to use it.” Only Republican Sinn Féin were aghast, considering the use of “a false name for Derry” on passports to be “an assault on Irish national identity”.
However well-intentioned, this sweetener for unionists will have little calming effect on the controversy over the city’s official name. The row has been bubbling away for centuries, and shows no sign of abating. On road signs approaching the city, the prefix “London” is emphatically crossed out, while a hapless Canadian tourist who enquired in Belfast about buses travelling to Derry was told that it “didn’t exist”. Even a judicial review couldn’t settle the issue: in 2007, a judge in the High Court in Belfast ruled that the city officially remain Londonderry, despite strenuous representations by the nationalist-controlled council.
The names have become so linguistically and politically over-determined that it is almost impossible to refer to the city in a neutral way, apart from in self-consciously twee terms such as "Stroke City". It creates a serious headache for businesses, institutions and government bodies, who often put themselves through elaborate contortions to avoid offending either side of the community. A basic rule of thumb states that official bodies should reply to letters from Derry-dwellers (or Derry-deniers) using the same nomenclature used in the initial communication. The BBC has a canny practice of referring initially to Londonderry, and then to Derry in any mention after that. Of course, the whole thing is complicated further by the fact that almost everyone in the city, both Protestant and Catholic, refers to it as Derry in everyday speech. In her book Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, Susan McKay recounts how, back in the 1980s, an English broadcaster called the BBC newsroom in Belfast to ask why the loyalist Apprentice Boys of Derry were objecting to the local council changing its name to Derry City Council. It's not surprising that tourists are confused.
Yet, growing numbers of the unionist community are evidently going over to the other side when it comes to passport applications. The most visible example so far is UDA “brigadier” Jackie McDonald, who claimed that he was presented with a fast-tracked Irish passport by the President’s husband, Martin McAleese – with whom he plays golf – so that he could attend a Rangers game.
(Defending the move, McDonald claimed that his fundamental Britishness remained unsullied by this trivial bureaucratic detail.)
So what’s the big attraction for Northern unionists? Is the surge in applications evidence of an Irish Protestant renaissance, channelling the spirits of WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett? The truth may be simpler and a lot more prosaic. While the cost of a British adult passport and an Irish one is much the same, an Irish child’s passport is a great deal cheaper than its British counterpart, and pensioners can get an Irish passport for free. It seems that some Protestants have compared the market, and they’re choosing pragmatism over politics.
