Today is the 9th anniversary of the recording of my birth on the foreign births register of Ireland, marking the date I officially became an Irish citizen: 24 November 2015.
I’ll never forget picking up the envelope at the post office in Seattle a couple of weeks later. The paperwork came in a hand-addressed plain Kraft brown envelope looking like my Irish grandmother had written the address herself.
I had sent the application in months before. They estimated it would take four months to process and it came in at almost exactly that. I’d sent it and forgotten about it, though, so when I got a notice to pick up mail at the post office that was marked “international” and “magazine,” I couldn’t imagine what was waiting for me. Then the clerk handed me this … no return address but when I saw that the postage was Irish, it hit me like a ton of bricks: my paperwork was back! I had not gotten any kind of notification of the status of my application, so this could have just as easily been a return of all my documents with a denial letter.
I returned to the car and sat in the driver’s seat and carefully opened the envelope — which I still have! — and slid out the stack of papers inside to find the document on the top of the stack that is essentially my Irish “birth certificate,” my foreign births registry.
A wave of emotions washed over me. I had done this as an exercise in sentimentality — “because I can” — and had never really considered what it would feel like to be an Irish citizen, to hold dual citizenship.
I found myself wondering what my grandparents would have thought. They left an Ireland that held little hope or opportunity for them in the early 20th century and sailed across the Atlantic to America, the land of opportunity. They did it for themselves but they also did it for their family.
In those days, American citizenship and an American passport was the gold standard. Why would any of their descendants ever want to get Irish citizenship — or any other, for that matter — when they already had American citizenship, the best in the world? It was a gift they had bequeathed all their descendants when they made their way past Lady Liberty and through Ellis Island.
But my grandparents never knew the the global economy we have now; in today’s worlds options are good. And the Irish passport I got a few months later is one of the most powerful — ranked third in the world in terms of global mobility, surpassing the US passport, which ranks eighth.
And, as it turns out, merely five years later, combined with Brian’s job offer in Spain, it it became our ticket to living and working in Europe!