The Irish passport at 100: Not just a travel document but a declaration of hope and of reclaiming identity

Irish Times

05-05-2025

Weeks after Terence Reynolds, originally from Cloncowley, Drumlish, Co
Longford
, died at his home in Yonkers in
New York
, his daughter Christina found an old suitcase in the attic.
'[It had] a single identifying label in cream tape with a handwritten writing stating CLONCOWLEY,' she wrote in reply to a request from the
Department for Foreign Affairs
for stories about
Irish
passports.
The story of Terence Reynolds is one of scores told in an exhibition on the history of the now 100-years-old passport at
Epic
, the Irish emigration museum on Custom House Quay in Dublin.
Throughout, it has not just been a travel document, but often a declaration of hope in a better future for those who left Ireland's shores, or a reclaiming of identity by many of those in the Irish diaspora today.
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The suitcase was the one Terence Reynolds, a carpenter, had carried from his Cloncowley home: 'Inside, I found what I believe was my dad's very first Irish passport. It was in pristine condition, frozen in time.'
His photograph was one she had never seen before, revealing 'a very young, fresh-faced' man 'full of hope, ambition, and the quiet determination that would carry him across the Atlantic'.
'I sat there imagining this young 20-year-old in 1968 getting on a plane for the first time and landing in 1960s New York, taking up abode in Inwood,' his daughter writes.
The passport of Terence Reynolds who emigrated from Co Longford to the United States in the 1960s
The contribution by Christina Reynolds illustrates one of the key themes of the On The Move exhibition, says Epic's historian, Catherine Healy: 'We really wanted to tap into the emotions around passports.'
The first Irish passports were used by WT Cosgrave, Desmond Fitzgerald and the delegation that went to Geneva in 1923 to take up the Irish Free State's League of Nations place 'to resounding applause'.
The public began to apply for the passports from April 1924, although significant tensions emerged between Dublin and London over the terminology to be used.
Writing from London, Fitzgerald, the minister for external relations, told the department's top official, Joseph P Walshe, of a meeting with 'a most objectionable' Foreign Office official.
The British were insistent that the term 'British subject' be used, arguing that any other language breached the Anglo-Irish Treaty and would 'cause endless trouble and confusion'.
Regarding the Irish passport as 'a branch' of the British one, the British side, the records show, 'didn't want Irishmen going around over in the US saying that they're not British subjects'.
The British arguments were a nonsense, Fitzgerald told them, since 'the term 'British subject' included everyone from (prime minister Stanley) Baldwin to an undiscovered savage in British Guiana'.
In the end, an uneasy compromise was reached: 'Ultimately, bearers were described as a 'citizen of the Irish Free State, one of the British Commonwealth of Nations',' says Healy.
The Irish Free State passport of Emily Dolan, issued in 1928, part of the exhibition On the Move: A Century of the Irish Passport at Epic, the Irish emigration museum. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
The early troubles did not end there because British consular officials sometimes refused to recognise the passport or doctored it if it was handed in to them, writing 'British subject' in, she says.
The first passport, well finished with a hard cover, cost 1 shilling. For most in the 1920s and 1930s, and later, it was not a declaration of pride but an exit document required for emigration.
Now available usually within days, for decades passports took longer to get. 'Passport officials were handwriting documents right up until the 1990s,' says Healy.
Security has tightened, too. A cabinet illuminated by ultraviolet light highlights just some of the security features of today's passports, including Celtic imagery invisible to the naked eye.
Ultraviolet light illiuminates some of the security features of a contemporary passport. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
The latest electronic passports now display the holders' biometric image three times – as a photograph, a laser imprint and a hologram.
Tougher security was prompted from the late 1980s following a series of incidents, including the conviction of an Irish official in 1989 who sold passports to North African buyers.
Irish passport security measures now include Celtic imagery invisible to the naked eye. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
In 2010, Micheál Martin, then the Minister for Foreign Affairs,
ordered an Israeli diplomat to leave Ireland
after Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, used Irish passports in the Dubai killing of a leading Hamas figure.
[
From the archive: Fake passports? They're part of a very long story
Opens in new window
]
The exhibition tells the stories of the famous, and those not so famous. Poet, WB Yeats – by then a senator – travelled on Irish, not British documents, to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm in December 1923.
WB Yeats with his wife, Georgie Hyde Lees, in 1923, the year he won the Nobel Prize. Photograph: Keystone/Getty
Not every artist thought the same way, however. James Joyce, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s , never applied for one: 'That surprised me,' says Healy.
However, he did seek one during the second World War for his daughter, Lucia, who he tried to move to Switzerland from the Parisian mental asylum where she was staying.
'German officials were already aware that she had British papers and said that it wouldn't be possible. She remained (in Paris) until 1951,' says the Epic historian.
Joyce never explained his attitude. 'It could have been purely pragmatic,' she says, 'or possibly resentment against the Free State, which he saw as quite suffocating.
James Joyce never applied for an Irish passport, says Epic historian Catherine Healy. Photograph: Getty
'In one of his letters to his son, he says he was advised to get an Irish passport, and he declined and got a British replacement instead. So, he consciously chose not to do so.'
For others, however, an Irish passport has been hugely important. Take Abigail O'Reilly, two of whose grandparents, Bill Phillips and his wife, Jean, left Cabra and Fairview respectively for 1960s England.
'They were part of the 'forgotten generation',' says O'Reilly, telling of how her grandparents 'ended up working together on the buses where he was the driver and she the conductor'.
During a break in Covid restrictions, O'Reilly moved to Dublin in 2020 for college. 'My grandfather and I have forged a really special bond. He has started opening up to me about his childhood,' she says.
Abigail O'Reilly with her mother Fiona O'Reilly and grandfather Bill Phillips
Suffering from dementia, his childhood memories are now uppermost in his mind; cycling through Moore Street with friends, knowing Brendan Behan. 'Ireland now seems to hold a much more romantic and nostalgic place in his mind,' says O'Reilly.
A year ago, she received her own Irish passport. 'I feel incredibly lucky and proud to have been able to return to a country which my grandparents were not able to remain in. I feel all the more connected to them,' she says.
The exhibition also tells of the secrets of the past, including of the adoption of thousands of Irish children who were sent abroad on Irish passports until the 1970s, 'With their birth name in the document', says Healy.
She tells the story of Brian Burke, who was born in Dublin to a single mother and spent his first year in St Patrick's Infant Hospital in Blackrock.
'He was adopted by an American couple in the US in the 1950s, even though legislation at the time didn't allow overseas adoptions. In his photo, he's just over a year-and-a-half old,' she says.
Once adopted, his name was changed to Daniel Doherty. Before his mother died, his adoptive mother shared with him his carefully kept adoption records.
Embarking on his journey to discover his Irish heritage, he requested in 2021, when he renewed his passport seven decades later, that both of his names would appear. And now they do.
A year later, he returned to Ireland, learning of 'an amazing family history'.
'I am blessed and thankful for the life I was given and the path I was set on so long ago,' he said.
'I am proud to be from Ireland and I value my Irish citizenship. It has been an amazing journey that started 70 years ago with a little green Irish passport.'