Who will accept ID cards?

[Tony Bowden]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:11 AM, Peter Tomlinson<pwt at iosis.co.uk> wrote:
>>> As a travel card inside the EU? No sign of that, either.
>> So everywhere it currently says that you can travel in the EU on a
>> passport or National ID Card, it'll have to say "except a UK National ID
>> card"??
> We are not in the Schengen area, so we have to use passports to and from
> other EU countries.

AIUI the idea is that any National ID card from any EU state is a
valid travel document within the EU for any EU citizen. Schengen is
mostly a red herring here, as that mostly just relates to the
abolition of compulsory border checks (there are still random ones in
most member countries). The UK ID card is meant to be a valid travel
intra-EU travel document, as long as it clearly shows you also being a
UK citizen. See, for example,
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/30/northern-ireland-identity-cards-shamrock
which discusses how Irish citizens living in Northern Ireland won't be
able to use their UK ID as a travel document.

(It misses the much more interesting question of whether NI citizens
who identify as Irish rather than British are likely to ever carry a
UK ID card anyway, but that's another discussion!)

I'm not entirely convinced by the claim that only the Irish government
can issue a travel document for an Irish citizen. Firstly, all NI
citizens have dual British and Irish citizenship and many hold both
passports. But, even if this were to be restricted to people who only
claim Irish and not British citizenship, other EU countries have ID
cards that operate as valid EU travel documents for non-citizens. I
have certainly travelled within Europe on my Estonian ID card, which
clearly marks me as an Irish citizen. (It may be that I'm not supposed
to do that, but I've never had any problems.)

Tony