We never thought we’d see the day.
DUP member and MP for East Antrim Sammy Wilson says he is signing at least two or three applications for Irish passports on a weekly basis, many of which are from Unionist voters in the North.
Wilson, who is strongly in favour of Brexit, says people are concerned about Britain’s divorce from the European Union and needing visas for ‘holidays in Spain’ and that has prompted committed Unionists to apply for Irish passports.
Speaking to the House of Lords EU committee in Belfast, Wilson said he was not surprised to see those who consider themselves British in Northern Ireland running scared.
“You know something as an MP that every week, and you know I represent a strongly unionist constituency, and I probably sign two or three Irish passport applications a week,” RTÉ reports him as saying.
“People who vote for me, who call themselves loyalists, do this because they think ‘aye Sammy, you never know once we leave the EU I don’t want to have to apply for a visa to go on my holiday to Spain’. So that’s the kind of thing that has provoked that.
“They may well regret mind you in a couple of years’ time when they find they have spent all this money on an Irish passport that they didn’t need to do, but anyway they have got the opportunity and they have taken it.”
Wilson says that he has not applied for an Irish passport himself.
“There has been so much misinformation about – (like) when we leave the EU you are going to require a visa to get into other European countries and everything else,” he added.
“People being canny will safeguard, if they have got the opportunity to do it they’ll safeguard themselves.
“Personally I haven’t applied for an Irish passport because a) I don’t believe all the scare stories and b) I am British and I wish to have my British identity registered by the passport I am carrying,” he said.
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