I recently travelled to Ireland. The airline told me that because of some treaty or other, “Irish and UK citizens do not require a passport for travel between Ireland and the UK but must bring valid photo identification.” The only accepted forms of identification are a passport, a driver’s licence, and “international student card” or a “national ID card”.
I took my driving licence. It got me past check-in and security, but on landing, the man behind the passport desk did not like it because place of birth on my driving licence is shown as Germany. He said it was no good. It was lucky I also had my passport.
Now I feel a bit hard done by. I’m a UK citizen and my taxes pay for the foreign office and the embassies and all that. But by a quirk of fate I do not get the benefit of the agreement made between these two countries. It’s not fair!
As always, I have questions: Was the passport man telling the truth or was he just trying to make life easy for himself? Does the Irish government really trust the DVLA or whoever issues “international student cards” to tell them whether or not I’m a UK citizen? Am I left out by accident, or is it a deliberate decision to exclude me from this scheme for pragmatic reasons? What can I do about this in practice?
Of course, there are lots of people who were born in the UK since the 1981 Citizenship Act who are not British citizens, so a British driver’s licence saying that you were born in the UK doesn’t prove you are British either, although it comes close to doing so if you are over 28. There is something
It is all ridiculous, given that the UK and Ireland have a land border that anyone can just drive across without anyone stopping them or checking anything. The British do at least get this and don’t bother imposing any kind of immigration controls on people coming from Ireland. (This does leave huge holes in their border as a consequence of the way passengers mingle at airports, but that is a different story).
I wonder when the rule about photo identification came in. I’ve never used it. Not once.
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Travel_Area#The_re-introduction_of_passport_and_identity_controls
Basically, the Irish have been checking passports at airports since 1997. I have had my passport checked every time I have entered Ireland by air since then. (This was once in 1997 and a few times in the last five years). I have never entered Ireland by ferry, and on those occasions I entered by land I just crossed the border without any opposition. The rule is apparently that immigration controls apply for everyone except British and Irish citizens, but that British and Irish citizens apparently have to provide documents sufficient to show that they are such, which effectively means that they are subject to something very like immigration control. Presumably accepting driving licenses is a way of showing that it “isn’t really” an immigration control, but that runs into the problem that Rob encountered – ie that a driving licence doesn’t prove citizenship. Next time I go to Ireland I am tempted to try it with a combination of my driving licence and my naturalisation certificate, and see if that works.
That still doesn’t make it that different from any other immigration check, however. It is possible to enter most places without a passport if one has to, even if there isn’t a presumption that you should be able to do so. (I managed to enter Britain without a passport once, although two things I did have were a French police report stating that my passport had been stolen and a photocopy of the personal details page of my passport). It is usually harder to be let on the plane in the first place.
On that, Ryanair will not let you use their online check-in to fly to Ireland with any document other than a passport. In many cases, this presumably alleviates this kind of problem when people get there.
Thanks, Michael, that explains it, even if *it* doesn’t make all that much sense.
One should never attempt to try to make the rules and policies of immigration bureaucracies and officials to make any kind of sense. That way lies madness.