My grandfather left Galway City in the 1890's as a nine year old boy who had just lost his father and eldest brother. His mother, a brave and enterprising soul, had gathered together her remaining brood and embarked on a journey of renewal to Cape Town - inevitably via Dublin itself and Liverpool. On the strength of that ancestral connection, I carry an Irish passport - proudly and conveniently.
The very first time I was able to use this invaluable travel document, I was nineteen and determined to visit the land of my forefather. On a bitterly cold, foggy morning disembarking from the ferry at Dun Laoghaire, I was part of a crowd of some two hundred day trippers who were confronted by a lone Irish immigration official sheltered alongside a brazier in a wooden quayside hut warming his hands on a mug. He poked a scarf-embalmed head out of his nest and peered at the advancing horde. It was definitely not a day for stepping outside and checking travel documents one by one. He waved one mittened hand.
'All you's with an Irish passport can carry on straight.'
The surge of freezing bodies hesitated but momentarily and then swept past him towards the promise of on-shore warmth. I was left holding my brand new, green, harp-adorned passport, uninspected and with a sense of betrayal - my moment of triumphal homecoming snatched from me by one man's pragmatic defiance of the elements.
I trod on Irish soil for the first time, unchallenged but also somehow unbaptised.
As I gazed down from my bargain seat on the ordered fields and hedgerows of the Pale, I remembered that first visit some forty years previously and my youthful awe at the power of lore and legend in Ireland. Apart from conferring on me the infinite gift of travel, my Irish passport had, over the years, given me a sense of identity, of connection with a tradition of literary giants - a largely unexplored causeway to world of Celtic faith and fealty.
The airline announcements crackled across my romantic, fanciful reflections. Within moments I was being processed through a modern airport portal, subject to a perfunctory passport check and bundled out into the milky light of a mild Dublin morning. Welcome home.
