Fun With Derivative Citizenship

Ireland from space, courtesy of NASA

BBC reporter Simon Maybin recently set out to discover just how many how many Britons might be entitled to Irish citizenship. He’d heard estimates as high as 1-in-4 but, as it turns out, that number tracks a Guinness pool about whether folks had any Irish ancestry or saw themselves as Irish. Since everyone sees themselves as a little bit Irish after a Guinness or two, that wasn’t the most accurate assessment of citizenship.

So Maybin called Ireland’s Citizens Information service. He learned that he himself was qualified for Irish citizenship because his mother was born in Ireland – despite the fact that she never held an Irish passport herself. Her very birth in Ireland made her a citizen. Maybin further found that “The same rules apply if you have a grandparent born on the island of Ireland.” Though, he qualified: “There are a few other subtleties to the rules on getting Irish citizenship, including a change for people born after 2005.”

With this broad legal knowledge under his belt, Maybin set out to estimate how many Britons had a parent or grandparent born in Ireland. Some maths later, Maybin concluded that nearly 6.7 million people in the UK might quality for Irish citizenship. That’s well in excess of Ireland’s 4.6 million population and nearly 10% of Brits.

It’s an in-class problem on steroids! Super fun.

-KitJ