Suzanne Harrington: My Irish passport is my most treasured possession

"It means that I now have more rights while living in the UK than a UK person living in the UK with a UK passport."

Maybe it’s down to unintentionally doing intermittent fasting – not as a weight management thing, more a case of post-lockdown pre-Christmas blue-arsed-fly syndrome fuelled entirely by caffeine and adrenaline – I find my normal levels of fury at those Eton messers running (that is, ruining) the UK are approaching a kind of wild-eyed, mouth-foaming crescendo. I should probably have a banana

Brexit is bearing down on those of us daft enough to still be resident in the UK like a runaway truck, as we flop prostrate in the road, already flattened by Covid. Tesco are stockpiling food. Not for the festive rush, but for when we are reduced to eating each other’s pets and small children in January because the food delivery lorries are backed up in Calais. 

My Irish passport – since 2016 my most treasured possession (I’ve always been fond of it, but for the past four and a half years I caress it daily, occasionally kissing it when nobody is looking) – means that I now have more rights while living in the UK than a UK person living in the UK with a UK passport. 

Which, in terms of absurdist own goal-ism, is off the scale. However, the smugness of knowing this won’t be much help when we are brawling in the aisles over the last bunch of bendy bananas.

Meanwhile, those fuckwitted fops with their oven ready rhetoric about taking back control are now arguing with Brussels about fish. Basically, if a fish swims over an invisible line in the sea, it belongs to Britain, but if a traumatised human in a rubber dinghy floats over that same pretend line, they belong in detention. 

To contextualise - the UK fishing industry employs 12,000 people; Debenhams employs 25,000, of which 12,000 are in the UK, but they’re only women, so they don’t count. It’s all about the fish. 

And so England continues its isolationist march off the cliff of arrogance into the sea of stupidity where it looks set to drown like the very migrants it values less than cod. 

No wonder Scotland is screaming for another independence referendum and Wales has closed its borders; England – steered by that hateful handful of corrupt, incompetent poshos and their cronies – has lost its mind. 

Hence the vaccination distraction, its initial roll out speeded ahead by several weeks, so that Britain could be the winner, the fastest, the cleverest, the best. At a moment when EU countries should be hugging and high fiving each other– metaphorically for now – as the first human in the world gets the plague vaccine, instead the UK’s health secretary attempts a clumsy hijack, turning an opportunity for cohesion and collective joy into a pathetic jingoistic publicity stunt. 

V Day. Seriously. V Day? 

The vaccine was invented in Germany by the offspring of Turkish immigrants and made in Belgium. No, you insufferable Tory morons, not V Day. EU Day. Like every other day, it was EU Day. Muppets.

I should probably eat something.