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IT LOOKED LIKE we might miss our flight. The airline wouldn’t give us our boarding passes – we were travelling from Malaga to London – without checking my girlfriend’s papers.
She’s from Spain but has worked in the NHS for 10 years. There was only one member of staff at the Wizz Air customer service desk, and the queue was long. They’d never asked to check her visa before, but apparently the rules had changed.
After a bit of a palaver, she found whatever document they were looking for in an old email, and we raced through security and towards our gate.
Then we saw it, the curling, sweaty mass of British people queuing for passport control. It was a Sunday in June on the Costa del Sol, after all. The line extended right through the departures lounge, past the duty-free kiosks and fast-food diners, maybe three hundred people deep.
‘Mother of God’, I thought. ‘We’re definitely not catching this plane.’
I was about to give up when my girlfriend pulled my sleeve.
‘Look. There’s a second, empty line. It’s for EU citizens.’
As we rushed ahead, bypassing the heaving throng of sunburned Englishmen called Keith, the feeling of euphoria I experienced was overpowering. This occurred at the cellular level, and it was further exacerbated by my Irish transgenerational trauma. It was a combination of schadenfreude and smugness. I can’t help it; it was a beautiful moment. We were finally winning. We were in the WINNING QUEUE.
Pulling my grainy burgundy passport from my pocket, I began to stroke the gold-embossed ‘Éire’ lettering with a tenderness that I had never done previously.
‘The humble and proud nation of Ireland’, I whispered. Then I made what some people have described as sex noises. Much to the annoyance of my partner, I recorded the whole thing on my phone. We were still running late for the flight, in fairness to her.
‘That wasn’t very nice to those people in the queue’, she insisted. I had to smile. She was born with a surplus of empathy, which is why she continues to work in the public health service of a country that is often accused of being hard on immigrants.
I uploaded the video of me skipping the British passport queue on social media when we landed in Gatwick, and it had gone viral by the time we got home to East London.
The Daily Mail stumbled across it the next day. They published it online with the headline ‘Irish tourist taunts Brits forced to queue for passport control in Spain as he laughs and flashes his EU papers’.
They reported that I was heard saying ‘Look at that now. Oh yeah, that’s good’.
The comments section was a bonfire of hate and nonsense. Posts ranged from the mildly bigoted (‘Oirish peasant!’), the incomprehensible (‘WHEN reform win – Ireland will be awash with immigrants’) to the outright unhinged (‘It’s best to go to Clacton or skeggy. Look after our own and spend money in our own country than go to horrible Europe. Not sure why people go to Europe’). That last one reads like a script for a play about Stockholm Syndrome.
Some commentators on social media suggested that I must hate England. This could not be further from the truth. I live there, and I love it. London has the best comedy clubs in the world. That I can stand onstage every night and tell jokes about the UK and have people enjoy themselves speaks to the spirit of most British people. Generally speaking, English crowds are laid back, a bit tipsy and will laugh at anything if it’s funny.
There is, unfortunately, a subsection of English society that has lost the ability to laugh at itself. Brexit was the moment they found their voice. The sensitivity among them speaks to a despondency over the collapse of the Empire identity, and a loss of self-confidence more generally. They lash out with often racist abuse on social media, lamenting ‘cancel culture’ if they face even the gentlest push-back.
They can give it out, but they can’t take it. These are the people who don’t like me, and I’ll admit that the feeling is often mutual.
When the Daily Mail piece started getting shared around my hometown in Kildare, an anxious text from my mother was inevitable.
‘Pete… I think they are misrepresenting you… you didn’t actually taunt them… you did it quietly.’
Well, of course I did, that’s how she raised me. If you’re going to slag off the Brits, do it with humility and humour.
And don’t skip the queue.
Peter Flanagan is an Irish comedian and writer. You can find him on Twitter @peterflanagan and Instagram @peterflanagancomedy.
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