Who exactly are the Irish citizens in Northern Ireland?
The question arises from a Sinn Féin motion in Stormont last week and an Aontú Bill submitted to the Dáil last month. Both propose enabling Irish citizens in Northern Ireland to vote in presidential elections.
Restricting the franchise to Irish citizens could be seen as respecting British sovereignty and unionist identity, although many unionists see it otherwise. There are several examples around Europe, most notably Hungary and Cyprus, where the extension of voting rights to neighbouring territories is considered a hostile act. This is what sets Sinn Féin and Aontú’s proposal apart from extending voting rights to all citizens abroad, as recommended by the 2013 constitutional convention.
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Under Irish nationality law, almost everyone in Northern Ireland is an Irish citizen. Entitlement by birth or parenthood is effectively identical across the island. The difference is that anyone born in Northern Ireland must “activate” their Irish citizenship by performing “any act which only an Irish citizen is entitled to do.”
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This form of Schrodinger’s citizenship was enshrined in 2001 legislation to uphold the Belfast Agreement and respect those in Northern Ireland who do not wish to be Irish.
Acts of activation have deliberately never been defined. Applying for a passport is the example usually cited, hence the common misconception in Northern Ireland that holding an Irish passport confers citizenship. Much media coverage of the Sinn Féin motion and the Aontú Bill has used the term “Irish passport-holders” synonymously with Irish citizens. In reality, it is the act of lawfully applying for the passport that opens the box and confirms a person has always been Irish, although only from that point on (the quantum physics metaphor works only too well).
Registering to vote is also an act of activation. Almost everyone in Northern Ireland could register, using a British passport as identification if necessary, and automatically become Irish the instant they submit their application.
So there is an extent to which it is legally meaningless to speak of a restricted franchise. Political meaning is another matter. The DeSouza citizenship case, won by the UK government in 2019, highlighted that almost everyone in Northern Ireland is automatically British. The courts found there is no alternative, as people would otherwise be left stateless, in breach of international law. Many nationalists found this aggravating and the issue was taken seriously enough at the time to be addressed by taoiseach Leo Varadkar and British prime minister Theresa May. While it has since faded from the headlines, presidential elections could become an enormous, recurring DeSouza case in reverse, antagonising unionists every seven years by reminding them they are Irish if they open the box.
The practicalities of holding an all-Ireland election add further complications.
Unionists are horrified and nationalists entranced by the prospect of polling stations north of the Border. This seems unlikely, however, apart from unofficial stunts. Even an Irish government that wanted to try it could not properly deliver it, with or without the co-operation of the northern authorities. So voting would be by post, and perhaps also online, as this is a scenario for the mid-2030s at the earliest. The problem comes back to who would be entitled to vote.
Electoral registers are maintained in the Republic by local authorities, a system that could not be extended to Northern Ireland, or certainly not to all of it. So a central government department or agency in Dublin, presumably the Electoral Commission, would have to build a northern register. This could be done without access to UK government databases, as is the case with the Irish passport system, although it would need a separate application process.
Creating a register of self-activated Irish citizens in Northern Ireland might cause some unease, north and south, for various reasons. It would be viewed as a measure of Irish identity and nationalist aspiration in Northern Ireland, as happens with statistics for Irish passport applications. But an Electoral Register would have a far more pointed political subtext, not necessarily to nationalism’s advantage: registration could be low and would almost inevitably undercount the total nationalist population.
The most straightforward solution to all these problems would be to extend voting to Irish and British citizens in Northern Ireland, then try to present this as benign pragmatism and little different from the equal voting rights both sets of citizens already enjoy within the United Kingdom and Ireland. Registering to vote as a British citizen, using a British passport, for example, could be clarified as not activating Irish citizenship.
Presidents and presidential candidates might wish to acknowledge the British potential portion of the electorate. Of course, this all assumes that reassuring unionists is still part of anyone else’s agenda.
