John Devlin (“An Irish football fan spies a Brexit dividend”, Letters,
March 5) notes that 160,000 people in England and Wales have obtained Irish passports since Brexit. He hopes some of them will augment the national football team.
Remarkably, back in 2016 at the time of the Brexit referendum, the BBC calculated there were 6.7mn people in the UK — including 1.3mn in Northern Ireland — who don’t already have an Irish passport but who are entitled to one through a parent or grandparent.
That’s only 1O per cent of the UK population, but it’s a lot more than the 5.3mn population of the Republic of Ireland.
The World Cup beckons.
Blair Noonan
Dublin, Ireland
