Record number of Irish passports issued to Brits in Brexit rush

Britons are applying for Irish passports in unprecedented numbers, the country’s ambassador to the UK revealed today.

Dan Mulhall said Dublin was on course to issue twice the usual 50,000 passports to people in the UK this year and a record 500,000 to others around Europe as many look to secure their future rights regardless of the outcome of Brexit talks.

The latest figures for the first six months of 2017 follow a previous 40 per cent rise in the number of Britons seeking Irish passports during the second half of 2016, immediately after the EU referendum.

“That’s an extraordinary number of passports, well up on our previous numbers, which means that people around the world – many of them may be British people living in Europe, living elsewhere, with Irish connections – are looking for Irish passports in order to safeguard their position for the future”, Mulhall told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The figures were revealed as Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar stepped up the pressure on the British government to clarify its Brexit plans.

In his first speech in Northern Ireland, the Taoiseach warned “the clock is ticking” and demanded quicker progress on deciding how the border between the republic and Northern Ireland should look after Brexit.

“Time is running out and I fear there will be no extra time allowed”, Varadkar told students at Queen’s University in Belfast. He floated the idea of a bespoke customs union between the UK and EU, which would solve the problem of a hard border in Ireland once Britain has left the bloc.

Varadkar said he hoped a compromise on the issue can be reached ahead of a key Brexit summit in October, which he described as a “historic meeting for this island”.

In his comments ahead of Varadkar’s speech, Mulhall also said that Ireland wanted the UK to remain in the customs union in some form, claiming a a hard border between north and south was “not feasible”.

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Amid mixed messages from both the cabinet and their Labour opposition, Leave supporter and International Development Secretary Priti Patel insisted on Friday that the government’s Brexit position was “very clear”.

“That means we’ll be taking back control of our borders and our immigration policy, which means an end to free movement”, said Patel.

Prime Minister Theresa May has repeatedly said that leaving the single market and customs union is a necessary function of ending freedom of movement, with the government looking to pursue trade deals with other countries as the divorce is finalised.

Ireland, which will have the EU’s only land border with the UK after Brexit, is likely to be one of the countries most directly affected by Britain’s vote to leave the bloc. But its future has been put on the back burner as British and EU negotiators clash over issues like citizens’ rights and the Brexit divorce bill.