Irish Naturalisation: Who Gets to Claim a Place?

Sarah Moss is waiting for her Irish naturalisation certificate, but questions about where she belongs keep arriving before the paperwork. She has lived in Dublin for six years, works, pays tax, votes and takes part in Ireland. Still, she says she feels she’s lying whenever she gives a straightforward answer to “where are you from?”

In Ireland, Moss answers “northern England,” stressing “not London, not the south.” She has spent more of her life elsewhere, and neither parent came from the city where they raised her. When she returns, she says “I grew up here,” rather than claiming to be from Manchester. People look doubtful because she doesn’t sound that way. Elsewhere in Europe, she says she lives in Dublin—but a person isn’t from somewhere they moved to in their 40s.

Birthplace, paperwork and recognition

Last year, Moss received a prize for Scottish writers. The warmth of that recognition mattered, she says, partly because she’d rarely dared call herself Scottish. At the ceremony, conscious of her English accent, she spoke about her great-grandparents finding safety in Glasgow after fleeing Russia and Latvia 100 years ago. What officially qualified her for the prize, she writes, was that her American father and English mother were living in Scotland when she was born.

Moss says she likes being Scottish, has beloved Scottish friends and relatives, and has spent time in Scotland and set novels there. She’d often like to be Irish in some hyphenated or qualified way, but says she is “patently neither.” Her British passport names Glasgow as her birthplace; she’s awaiting the Irish naturalisation certificate.

The categories follow her into literary life. A writer’s national identity can seem as important as a sports player’s, Moss writes: which team they’re on, which country they represent, and which prizes they can win. She dislikes clubs and competitions, distrusts cliques and gangs, and asks how those divisions fit literature’s construction as an international sport.

Who gets counted as Irish?

Moss says the definition of an Irish, English or Scottish writer isn’t obvious to her. Many writers regarded as Irish live outside Ireland; some considered Irish in Ireland have more fluid identities elsewhere. She also notes that people who write, make art and music while living in Ireland aren’t habitually counted among “Irish artists.” There are no official rules for whether an immigrant writer can produce “Irish fiction,” she says, and customs probably vary.

Her own novels track the strain between living in a place and claiming it. The first novel she published after moving to Ireland took shape in the locked-down autumn of 2020, set on the Derbyshire moors she missed. At a makeshift desk in a small bedroom, she returned on the page to a place and voices she knew from childhood while she was still getting to know her allotted 5km.

Then she set a novel between Italy and north Clare, exploring belonging through love and knowledge rather than birthright. Its central character had lived in Ireland longer than Moss and married into an Irish family, but was English. Moss asked Irish friends to read drafts and built the novel so every scene included an outsider to Ireland.

Listening as a daily practice

Moss says she’s become increasingly unable to set contemporary novels in either Britain or Ireland without feeling the limits of her position. She still votes in England, but lives, works, socialises, pays tax and takes part in Ireland. Hiberno-English has entered her prose and speech; her accent hasn’t changed much, but her syntax and vocabulary have.

She says she’ll always be English in Ireland, and some elements of Irish life are understandably and probably rightly closed to her. While revising The Winter Guest, she grew more confident writing its Irish characters through daily observation, learning and listening. At a dinner with English and Irish people, she caught herself thinking that English people often don’t know how to behave or hear what others don’t say. “They? We. I.” Then she asks how often she remains oblivious. “It’s a life’s work, immigration.” Published by Picador, The Winter Guest leaves the question of whether it is an Irish book to its readers.