Happy St Patrick’s Day to the Irish, one and all. There are plenty of Brits who are a bit Irish, and the Irish government tries to include as honorary Irish, or would-be Irish, pretty well everyone else. Obviously, St Patrick himself wasn’t actually Irish, but a Brit, so thank you, Britain, and well done.
The position of the Irish in Britain – and indeed the British in Ireland, proportionately as large – is one of those historic ambiguities which doesn’t really fit into any of the contemporary narratives about being in or out of things. Ireland, other than six counties, obviously isn’t part of the UK, but it’s not foreign either. Most Irish people feel perfectly at home in Britain, probably much as the Scots or Welsh do; most Brits feel at least as at home in Ireland as in another constituent part of the UK. It’s not just being English speaking; more a sense of a family relationship that independence never quite interfered with.
That ambiguity is recognised in the Government of Ireland Act 1949, which acknowledged that the Republic of Ireland would not be treated as a foreign country for the purposes of British law. The mutual rights of residency and voting mean that the freedom of movement between the two countries is taken as read; not just by the travelling community.
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