No evidence for Irish passport numbers among MPs and peers

Claims about the number of UK parliamentarians with Irish passports have been widely shared on Twitter, including by the Labour MP Chris Bryant and the former MP and Europe minister Denis MacShane. The same claims have also appeared on Facebook.

As far as we can tell, these claims are not correct. They seem to originate with an anonymous Twitter account, which has provided no source for them, and has previously said “I make things up to amuse myself”.

It appears that neither the Houses of Parliament nor the Irish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which handles passport applications, routinely collects this data.

Because Ireland is an EU member, people who hold Irish citizenship (a requirement to hold an Irish passport) are entitled to free movement within the EU. Free movement rights for British passport holders ended when the Brexit transition period expired on 31 December 2020.

Where the claim comes from

On the morning of 31 October, Mr MacShane posted a tweet saying that 321 British MPs and peers held an Irish passport.

Mr Bryant subsequently shared this tweet with the comment: “This is quite an extraordinary fact. I wonder how many have other EU passports?”

When challenged by Twitter users on these figures, Mr MacShane replied that the source was another Twitter account, calling itself “Irishmonk”, which he said he had asked for information on its source.

It is true that the Irishmonk account did post tweets in December 2021 and June 2022, which included these figures. The account has often been asked where the numbers came from, and has given several responses, some of which appear to be jokes, citing “undercover sources”.

But it has never, to our knowledge, shared any supporting evidence. And it has given some explanations that appear to be untrue.

For instance, the account has said that the number is published by the UK government, but both the Electoral Commission and the House of Commons Library told Full Fact that they have no knowledge of this information being published, when we asked them last time this claim circulated, in June.

On another occasion the account has said that UK parliamentarians have to register their passport information. But in response to a Freedom of Information request about MPs nationalities in 2018, the House of Commons said “this information is not routinely collected for business purposes, so we hold no comprehensive list of this nature”. When we contacted Mr Bryant, he also told us that he has not been asked to register which passports he holds as an MP.

The Irishmonk Twitter account has also said that UK MPs must register this fact with the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs when they apply for Irish passports. We contacted the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, which told us: “The Passport Service does not capture professions as part of the passport application process.”

Mr MacShane also said the Irish passport figures he tweeted had been reported by several reputable newspapers.

We have not been able to find any newspapers reporting his figures, other than in a reader’s letter in Newbury Weekly News at the end of June 2022. Although the Times did report in 2016 that it understood the number of MPs and peers who had applied for Irish passports since the Brexit referendum was in “double digits”.

We have sent messages to both Mr MacShane and the Irishmonk account, asking for the source of their figures, but have not yet received a reply.

Mr Bryant told us that Mr MacShane told him that the Independent had reported the figures, and also cited a tweet in June. We have not been able to find the 321 figure published by the Independent.

Following our contact, Mr Bryant tweeted that he was “beginning to doubt” the figures.

Could 321 parliamentarians have Irish passports?

Citizens of the Republic of Ireland can become MPs or members of the House of Lords, so it is possible that many of them hold Irish passports. However, 321 would be a very high number.

There are currently 650 MPs and 814 members of the Lords (772 of whom are eligible to vote), making up 1,464 parliamentarians between them. If 321 held Irish passports, that would be about 22% of the total.

A BBC report attempted to estimate conservatively the number of people in the UK who were eligible for Irish passports in 2016.

It concluded that in Great Britain, about five million second- and third-generation immigrants from Ireland and about 650,000 first-generation immigrants would have been eligible. This amounts to about 9% of the population of Great Britain in 2016, but of course it doesn’t mean that all those people actually had Irish passports, or planned to apply for them.

Anyone born on the island of Ireland (including in Northern Ireland) before 2005 is an Irish citizen, and therefore eligible for an Irish passport. The same applies to people with a parent or grandparent who was born there. Other people are also eligible, depending on their and their ancestors’ citizenship and residency history.

Research by FactCheckNI suggests that roughly half of the population of Northern Ireland has an Irish passport, but Northern Ireland only accounts for 18 out of 650 MPs.

It was reported last year that more than 422,000 applications for Irish passports were made by applicants in Great Britain between 2016 and 2020.

Image courtesy of chensiuan