There are a number of potential twits on the list at the moment but this is one I just couldn’t ignore. While it has nothing directly to do with Cassidy, readers of this blog will realise that I believe passionately in the rights of Irish speakers. I also believe in the rights of the speakers of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and other minority languages to use those languages without let or hindrance.
I have an Irish passport and that passport allows me to have my name spelled correctly in Irish in pride of place. I had always assumed that British passports worked the same way and that if a man from Wales called Siôn ap Rhŷs or a Scotsman called Dùghlas MacLeòid or a woman from the Six Counties called Máirín Nic Néill decided to get a British passport spelled correctly in their language, that would be no problem. Apparently I was wrong!
You are not allowed to have your name spelled correctly in Irish, Scottish Gaelic or Welsh, if that name includes a character not found in English. There’s obviously no technical problem with this, since other European countries (including the Republic) manage to allow people to spell their own names properly with whatever diacritics or accents are required. No, at some stage, these fascist arseholes simply made a random decision that they would deny people their human rights and refuse to spell their names properly. And that’s not all. When you look on their website (https://passportapplication.service.gov.uk/help/html/pages/10.05_01_name-to-appear_en.html), they explain it in these terms:
If your name has a special character or accent mark please enter your name using a normal letter eg e instead of é or a instead of ä etc.
Ah, so that’s why you’ve decided to discriminate against indigenous linguistic minorities. Because they aren’t normal! Thanks for clearing that up for us …
I sincerely hope that people will reblog this and spread it far and wide, and that someone, somewhere will take these people to the European Court of Human Rights. I will never have a British passport but I believe that people who use Celtic languages as their main language have a right to express their identity within the UK and these ignorant fascists have no right to deny people basic human rights on the basis that their decision to use a language other than English is abnormal.
cassidyslangscam 