Here’s an untaxing question for your next table quiz. What links James Orr, the Dublin Convention Centre, the score for the national anthem and the Lake Isle of Inishfree? That’s right. They are all featured on the current Irish passport. But maybe not for much longer.
News emerged this week of the Government’s plans to consult the public on an upcoming redesign. The online poll is already confusing citizens who hate the countryside, fear its savage fauna and avoid its venomous flora. The questions are, indeed, all about plants and animals. Obviously I picked the jellyfish over the lapwing (whatever that may be). The basking shark is very much the unthreatening maiden aunt of its genus, but, for want of anything more conspicuously man-eating, I went for that option over some dreary butterfly or other. Hang on! There’s a lizard in the list. We have lizards? Weren’t they covered in some codicil of the St Patrick Expulsion Agreement? Anyway, if we end up with a jellyfish, a shark and a lizard – and thus the coolest passport in the world – you will have this column to thank.
Nobody used to much care about such decoration. I have just dug out a green, hardbacked passport issued in 1979. Unlike the current, smaller booklet, the late-20th-century incarnation could stop a small-calibre bullet or protect the traveller from scorpion attack. Intriguingly, the interior has a space for “signature of bearer” and “signature of wife” – thus reminding us how close we are to a time when “male” was the official default setting for “person”. Inside there are no pictures of ivy-wreathed castles or quotes in Ulster-Scots from strategically selected poets. There are just pages and pages of green space waiting for a stamp from the immigration officials of Yugoslavia or the German Democratic Republic. Back then an official document was expected to be functional and unflamboyant. Neither the bearer nor his wife were interested in any frippery. The passport was merely a document to get him (and, to a lesser extent, her) through the next frontier.
The controversial “Passports for Investment scheme” that ran from 1988 to 1998 was not predicated on any yearning for sound graphic design
This is not to suggest such things attract no affection. If certain columns in British mid-market tabloids were to be believed, the Quixotic Brexit campaign was launched largely to reclaim the old British passport. The document itself. Not the particular rights and privileges it guarantees (if there are any). It was all about the blue – or maybe black – book with the ornate crest on the front. The one with the text the Rolling Stones satirised as Their Satanic Majesties Request on their ill-advised 1967 dip into psychedelia. They got what they wanted. They can gaze upon its wondrous beauty as they shuffle along the snaking “All other passports” queue when entering unimpressed EU nations.
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That Brexit debacle brings us back to the domestic passport. As the reality sank in, every second British person with an immediate Irish ancestor applied for the booklet with the harp on front. Shortly after John le Carré's death, his son explained that the author, whose grandmother was from Cork, did whatever the opposite is of taking the soup, and, on his final birthday, literally wrapped himself in an Irish flag. None of these people was, however, expressing affection for the aesthetics of the volume itself. The pictures of jockeys and banjos played no part in their decision. The controversial “Passports for Investment scheme” that ran from 1988 to 1998 was not predicated on any yearning for sound graphic design. Many frequent travellers would have little idea what is to be found two pages beyond the bit you show to the airline staff before gaining the fuselage. We are a sentimental people. But that sentiment does not extend to passports any more than it extends to driving licences.
What controversy can arise from a choice between cabbage and gorse? Better that than pitting My Bloody Valentine against The Dubliners
All that noted, the current design is reasonably attractive. Back in 2013, when it was introduced, Eamon Gilmore, then tánaiste, described it as representing “our culture, our history and our people”. It does that well enough. True, there are no price-gouging hotels, no torrents of litter, no belching slurry pits. What do you expect from a document issued by a division of the Department of Foreign Affairs? A passport is not the place for searing social realism.
Still, the current consultation does play into the sentimental notion that most of us remain connected to the land, the sea and the bracing country air. I understand the strategy. What controversy can arise from a choice between cabbage and gorse (cabbage obviously, as you can eat the bleeding thing)? Better that than pitting My Bloody Valentine against The Dubliners. The current questionnaire is going to annoy only that rare sort of bitter urbanite who takes assumption of knowledge about ditches, fields and corncrakes as a personal affront. Wherever would you find such a fruitcake?
