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Thursday, July 01, 2010
Royal visit nice but not necessary
BY TP O’MAHONY
SO should we get uptight about the prospect of a visit to the Republic by Queen Elizabeth II?
It now looks set to take place in 2011, before the end of President McAleese’s term of office in Áras an Uachtaráin. True to form, Sinn Fein has begun to posture – but to what end?
The vast majority of Irish people look upon the goings-on of the members of the British royal family as classy soap opera. They treat the entertaining dramas emanating from Buckingham Palace much as they do episodes of Coronation Street – as a form of escapism.
Sometimes these dramas end in tragedy. In 2009 my former Irish Press colleague, Mary Kenny, wrote a book called Crown and Shamrock, which was sub-titled "Love and Hate Between Ireland and the British Monarchy".
The love element of Ms Kenny’s title was clearly manifested in 1997, after the death of Princess Diana in Paris, while the hate element accounted for the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979 off the County Sligo coast.
The best summary of our schizophrenic attitudes is contained in a passage from Mary Robinson – The Authorised Biography by Olivia O’Leary and Helen Burke: "Popular Irish interest in the British royal family is huge, but is accompanied by political hostility to the Crown as a symbol of Irish oppression".
In a sense, it was President Robinson’s historic meeting with Queen Elizabeth II in London in May 1993 which set the scene not just for Mary Kenny’s book but for serious consideration of a return visit to Dublin by the Queen.
And indeed it is the core contention of Ms Kenny’s book that the normalisation of Anglo-Irish relations now requires a formal State visit by the British monarch to the Irish Republic.
The last such visit occurred in 1911 when King George V and Queen Mary came to Dublin. Of this and previous visits, Ms Kenny makes this telling observation: "Because of his pleasant experiences in Ireland, George believed the Irish liked him: he did not quite understand the circumlocutions of the Celtic mind, which can both like and dislike simultaneously".
And this was a monarch with a genuine regard for Ireland – according to the historian AJP Taylor, he protested against the behaviour of the Black-and-Tans – unlike Queen Victoria, who could never overcome the perception of her as the Famine Queen.
Astonishingly, a statue of her remained in the grounds of Leinster House until 1948 – it now stands in the centre of Sydney.
So is the visit of Victoria’s successor, Elizabeth II, really necessary for the normalisation of Anglo-Irish relations? Frankly, I don’t think so.
The crucial normalisation occurred in April 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. And it is worth pointing out, apropos of Sinn Fein’s objections to a royal visit, that they signed up to this agreement, central to which is an acceptance of the principle that the constitutional position of Northern Ireland cannot be altered without the consent of the people.
The Queen remains part of that constitutional position. The Northern troubles, of course, bedevilled AngloIrish relations, and made a royal visit to Dublin impracticable.
The Good Friday Agreement changed all of that, and the recent unqualified apology by the new British Prime Minister, David Cameron, for the Bloody Sunday shootings, did much to heal a 38-year-old communal wound and remove what would be regarded as a final obstacle to a royal visit.
And although I regard all monarchies as an aberration in the 21st century, we must respect the fact that Queen Elizabeth is Britain’s Head of State. A royal visit would now be nice.
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