Fintan O’Toole: Why we should welcome the new tribe of Anglo-Irish people

I never liked the term Anglo-Irish. Particularly when the subject was Irish literature, it functioned as barely coded sectarianism. It was a way of cordoning off Protestant Irish writers from the “real” Ireland. As Brendan Behan put it: “The myth of the Anglo-Irish” was an “attempt to drag Irish writers (particularly those who happened to be Protestants) after the fox-hunt and the royalist inanity.”

Yet, listening to Philippe Sands's terrific BBC radio documentary on John le Carré on Saturday evening, it was hard not be moved by the recollection by le Carré's son, Nicholas Cornwell (who writes as Nick Harkaway) that "On his last birthday, I gave him an Irish flag, and so one of the last photographs I have of him is him sitting wrapped in an Irish flag, grinning his head off. He died an Irishman."

Le Carré, arguably the greatest anatomist of Englishness in the postwar world, took out Irish citizenship, which he could claim through his maternal grandmother, at the end of his life. He was pushed into Irishness by Brexit but his feelings were not just negative. According to Nicholas, “It was vastly moving for him, a huge emotional shift, an awareness of history and self which had genuinely eluded him his whole life.”

So is le Carré now to be thought of as an Anglo-Irish writer? Why not? It was, in the end, what he chose to be.

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Passports

And this is a choice that hundreds of thousands of less famous people have been making in the years since Brexit. Figures released last week by the Department of Foreign Affairs show just over 422,000 applications for Irish passports were made in Britain in the years 2016 to 2020. So far, 358,900 passports have actually been issued. (This does not include the number of applications for Irish passports from residents of Northern Ireland, which has at least doubled over the same period.)

Of course, some of this is purely pragmatic. The Irish flag is a flag of convenience, a way to retain EU citizenship and the rights that come with it. For some, that’s all it means.

But I know from talking to friends in England who have gone down this road that what begins with expediency can end in discovery. There’s a lot of excavating going on. It starts as a treasure hunt – find the Irish granny who is the golden ticket to EU citizenship. But once you start digging things up, you also find what you were not looking for.

And, perhaps, what that Irish granny or granddad didn’t want you to find. The Irish emigrants who are now valuable family heirlooms didn’t just bury treasures – they interred shame and secrets and the rage of rejection.

History of pain

In the 1950s, John McGahern, working on a London building site, sat over lunch with a young Co Clare man reading of another wet Irish summer in his provincial newspaper. Prayers were being offered at Masses for the rains to cease but the young emigrant added his own supplication: “May it never stop. May they all have to climb trees. May it rise higher than it did for fukken Noah!”

There’s a history of pain and loss and the bitterness of being unwanted. There’s that old acronym used by English social workers – PFI, pregnant from Ireland. There’s the battered brown cardboard suitcase with nothing in it but a pair of navvy’s wellington boots.

There's also a history, from the Irish side, of selective appropriation. We've been all too happy to relocate Francis Bacon's studio to Dublin, to celebrate the Irish heritage of the Beatles or Dusty Springfield or Kate Bush or the Smiths, to embrace Daniel Day-Lewis or Judi Dench, to claim any footballer with an Irish granny. We're also all too happy, when it suits us, to dismiss the grandchildren, or even the children, of the Irish diaspora in Britain as Plastic Paddies.

But in the last four years this big, quiet thing has been happening – the acquisition by Ireland of what will undoubtedly soon amount to half a million new citizens who grew up, and continue to be, British. They are a new Anglo-Irish tribe.

The hyphen is perhaps the most important bit, and the most productive. Irish history has been bedevilled by binaries, by the insistence that you have to be one thing or the other. Those glorious six letters in the Belfast Agreement, declaring the right of those in Northern Ireland to be Irish or British “or both” are the escape hatch.

Undermines

One of the ironies of Brexit is that even as it undermines, through its negative English nationalism, that non-binary ideal of identity, it has generated a new one. The “or both” has escaped from its Northern Ireland context and become a new Anglo-Irish reality.

If it does nothing else, this helps to repay a historic debt. Ireland pushed its unwanted people out to England. Even if their grandchildren want to reconnect to their Irish past for purely utilitarian reasons, we owe them that small restitution. But the “awareness of history and self” that le Carré found at the end of his life goes both ways. This is our history too, our self, our past, our hyphen.