Originally Posted by
exesoundtech
Can imagine that would have been entertaining for my late father with a city of birth in India, while being ethnically British (and indeed a British Citizen at birth)... Added to which he'd have been entitled to an Irish passport under the grandparent rule
. Guess it all goes to show that while the CTA rules sound fine on treaty paper, the reality is a bit of an admin nightmare where the only sensible solution is that above of "you don't need a passport, except for the purpose of proving you don't need a passport".
Now, don't get me started on the subject that (with significant hindsight) I really wish he'd exerted that right to Irish citizenship before I was born...
The concerning thing is that there's so many British people of that generation who were born far afield that your father's case isn't even an uncommon one - of course, India being common but also literally almost everywhere across the old Empire and further (I mean, too many instances of that generation born in Beirut and Aden out there).
And it's probably even worse across in Ireland — there are so many Irish citizens who are not born in Ireland. If I have my stats right, half of the 3m Irish diaspora (using the strict Irish Govt's definition meaning Irish citizens abroad) are not Irish-born, which means that every 1 in 5 Irish who have CTA rights can't state that claim definitively via their location of birth.
In all honesty, if the UK and Ireland unified their visa regimes (aka, not have different visa-required national lists and providing BIVS for all visa-required nationals), the CTA would work a lot better process-wise for all involved. Currently visa-exempted nationals are provided two months of deemed leave if they enter the UK from Ireland - and if those lists of who requires a visa were unified, there really isn't a need to check documents from anyone since those visa-required nationals would have been checked either at the Irish or the British border. Sure, you have the problem of illegal inter-country immigration still, but that's not going to be alleviated by a cursory document check anyway. Even in today's situation the land border is already porous.