It is high time the UK explained and defended automatic citizenship

It says that this would remedy ‘unequal citizenship’ and clarification is needed on EU rights.

There is concern about the right to identify as Irish and British, and, in a bogus link, about citizenship.

This is the latest development in a campaign around Emma de Souza and her American born husband Jake.

It is about the fact that anyone born in Northern Ireland is automatically a British citizen.

The most troubling aspect of this case has been the near silence of unionist MPs and the British government on it.

Indeed, it is worse than that. The secretary of state Julian Smith appeared before a committee of Westminster MPs and, sitting alongside an NIO official, seemed to suggest that the UK might amend the automatic citizenship.

As politicians including the former Ulster Unionist Stormont minister, Dermot Nesbitt, and the former DUP minister, Peter Weir, have explained in this paper, any such change would be a breach of the Belfast Agreement. There was no suggestion in 1998 that citizenship and identity would become entangled so that automatic citizenship would change.

The alarming, yet all too predictable, UK weakness and silence on this matter contrasts with the wholly predictable partisanship of the Irish government (in favour of change).

It is absurd to talk of transposing the Belfat Agreement into law 21 years after it was signed, and disingenuous too. That deal is in fact under increasing assault from nationalists who masquerade as its defenders, and a London has little to say about that assault.

Expert tribunal judges were crystal clear that people born in Northern Ireland remain British citizens according to the law, even if they identify as Irish. There is, in addition to that, a right to change citizenship. And it is high time the government explains and defends the status quo.