The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh greet Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore. Picture: The Irish Labour Party
I joined the small crowd at the barrier to watch the Queen drive past. “Will she be on a horse?” a boy asked the nearest policeman. The policeman replied in a strong Donegal accent.
“Mister,” said a girl, “are all the police today from Donegal because the Queen owns dem countries?” (Whatever the status of the six counties of Northern Ireland, the Queen very definitely has no claim on Donegal, which is part of the republic, though in the northwest of the island.)
It has been a strange but memorable week in Dublin. The city has been in near lockdown. Innumerable numbers of police in high-visibility jackets, lining empty roads, have given it an eerie, sci-fi feel. The Queen has made no public appearances, and the small crowds that have lined the routes of her itinerary have been largely accidental: pedestrians stuck trying to cross the city, but happy to catch a glimpse of royalty while they wait.
This is a pity. Because Elizabeth II has quickly won respect and even affection here for the brisk and unsentimental way she has gone about shattering the shibboleths of postcolonial enmity.
A number of the London newspapers reported the royal visit with headlines playing on the motif of “one small step…”: the Independent front page featured a close-up photo of the royal foot landing on Irish soil. The echoes of the moon landing seemed appropriate (as the commentator Fintan O’Toole noted later): to many British, Ireland has sometimes seemed as alien as the moon.
But richer iconography was to follow. At the one-time Viceregal Lodge, now the presidential residence (Áras an Úachtaráin), the Queen was received by the president, Mary McAleese, and a military guard of honour. She was greeted, in Irish, as “Banríon Éilís a dó,” and the army band struck up God Save The Queen. In the wake of an economic crisis that has seen Irish sovereignty compromised by the effective handover of fiscal authority to the European Central Bank and IMF, it was extraordinary (if paradoxical) to see that sovereignty reaffirmed by the Irish army playing the British anthem for the British monarch.
And it was heretofore inconceivable to imagine that anthem being played in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance. Though the garden plays little role in the everyday life of the city, and occupies a corner of one of the more desultory of Dublin’s Georgian squares, it is the official monument to “our Fenian dead”: those who gave their lives across the centuries in the military pursuit of Irish independence. That the Queen laid a wreath to the fallen, bowed to it, and observed a minute’s silence seemed to be an admission of the validity of the long Irish struggle for independence from Britain. It was verging on an act of contrition, akin to David Cameron’s apology last year for the killings of Bloody Sunday.
Yet nearby, beyond heavily-policed barriers, I spoke to people who believed it was precisely the opposite. Some of those at the protest led by the fringe republican socialist party, Éirígí, fitted the media stereotype of a motley crew of aggressive malcontents; but others were there on soft-spoken principle. Chloe Devereux and her classmates at one of the city’s leading fee-paying schools were too young to vote, and had no involvement in republican politics. But they were students of history, and had been provoked to join the protest by the visit to hallowed ground, which they saw as a “disrespectful” as long as Northern Ireland's six counties were “still British.”
That perspective had further endorsement at the hallowed sporting ground of Croke Park, home of the Gaelic Athletic Association. This was another iconic moment: Croke Park being the site of one of the defining events of Anglo-Irish history, the murder of 14 civilians by British security forces at a football match in 1920; the original Bloody Sunday. For some in the Gaelic community, the Queen’s visit was a step too far: representatives of five of the six counties of Northern Ireland declined invitations. Yet much of the sting had been taken out of this moment four years earlier, when the English rugby team visited Croke Park in an unprecedented display of sporting ecumenism by the GAA, which had previously been vehemently opposed to hosting “foreign” sports, let alone the British themselves. (The English had the good grace to be roundly beaten.) There was no apology when the Queen visited, but the event in itself was profoundly symbolic.
Then, at the former seat of British power in Ireland, Dublin Castle, the Queen opened her speech at the state banquet with a simple gesture of staggering efficacy. “A Úachtaráin agus a chairde,” she began, in Irish, in an accent at least as good as that of the absent Gerry Adams. That means, simply, “President and friends.” In her reaffirmation of Irish sovereignty, and in her repeated gestures of friendship and even humility, Elizabeth II has endeared herself to many who would have thought themselves immune. It may, perhaps, prove possible to be a republican and a royalist.
***
Postscript: If there was one figure obviously missing at the state banquet for the Queen, it was the former Taoiseach (prime minister), Garret FitzGerald. FitzGerald orchestrated the breakthrough in relations between the two states, with Margaret Thatcher, in the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which paved the way for the Downing Street declaration of 1993, and ultimately the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
FitzGerald had been seriously ill for a couple of weeks (as recently as mid April, I interviewed him on the subject of Irish political reform, and found him hale, hearty and of typically acute mind), and he sadly died last night. The former president, Mary Robinson—a close personal friend of FitzGerald—said his death at the time of both the Queen’s visit and general economic crisis could be “an extraordinary gift,” in serving to “remind us of the goodness in him that was the best of us.”
“He was a statesman more than a politician,” she said, who “mentored the values that we need to think more about” in Irish life. Since his retirement from party politics, he returned to his former role as a commentator and academic; in recent years, he produced a series of articles on the economic crisis, for the Irish Times, that were incisive, instructive and sobering. He was a public intellectual of extraordinary capacity and breadth. As is said, in Irish: Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal (may his noble soul be at the right hand of God).
I joined the small crowd at the barrier to watch the Queen drive past. “Will she be on a horse?” a boy asked the nearest policeman. The policeman replied in a strong Donegal accent.
“Mister,” said a girl, “are all the police today from Donegal because the Queen owns dem countries?” (Whatever the status of the six counties of Northern Ireland, the Queen very definitely has no claim on Donegal, which is part of the republic, though in the northwest of the island.)
It has been a strange but memorable week in Dublin. The city has been in near lockdown. Innumerable numbers of police in high-visibility jackets, lining empty roads, have given it an eerie, sci-fi feel. The Queen has made no public appearances, and the small crowds that have lined the routes of her itinerary have been largely accidental: pedestrians stuck trying to cross the city, but happy to catch a glimpse of royalty while they wait.
This is a pity. Because Elizabeth II has quickly won respect and even affection here for the brisk and unsentimental way she has gone about shattering the shibboleths of postcolonial enmity.
A number of the London newspapers reported the royal visit with headlines playing on the motif of “one small step…”: the Independent front page featured a close-up photo of the royal foot landing on Irish soil. The echoes of the moon landing seemed appropriate (as the commentator Fintan O’Toole noted later): to many British, Ireland has sometimes seemed as alien as the moon.
But richer iconography was to follow. At the one-time Viceregal Lodge, now the presidential residence (Áras an Úachtaráin), the Queen was received by the president, Mary McAleese, and a military guard of honour. She was greeted, in Irish, as “Banríon Éilís a dó,” and the army band struck up God Save The Queen. In the wake of an economic crisis that has seen Irish sovereignty compromised by the effective handover of fiscal authority to the European Central Bank and IMF, it was extraordinary (if paradoxical) to see that sovereignty reaffirmed by the Irish army playing the British anthem for the British monarch.
And it was heretofore inconceivable to imagine that anthem being played in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance. Though the garden plays little role in the everyday life of the city, and occupies a corner of one of the more desultory of Dublin’s Georgian squares, it is the official monument to “our Fenian dead”: those who gave their lives across the centuries in the military pursuit of Irish independence. That the Queen laid a wreath to the fallen, bowed to it, and observed a minute’s silence seemed to be an admission of the validity of the long Irish struggle for independence from Britain. It was verging on an act of contrition, akin to David Cameron’s apology last year for the killings of Bloody Sunday.
Yet nearby, beyond heavily-policed barriers, I spoke to people who believed it was precisely the opposite. Some of those at the protest led by the fringe republican socialist party, Éirígí, fitted the media stereotype of a motley crew of aggressive malcontents; but others were there on soft-spoken principle. Chloe Devereux and her classmates at one of the city’s leading fee-paying schools were too young to vote, and had no involvement in republican politics. But they were students of history, and had been provoked to join the protest by the visit to hallowed ground, which they saw as a “disrespectful” as long as Northern Ireland's six counties were “still British.”
That perspective had further endorsement at the hallowed sporting ground of Croke Park, home of the Gaelic Athletic Association. This was another iconic moment: Croke Park being the site of one of the defining events of Anglo-Irish history, the murder of 14 civilians by British security forces at a football match in 1920; the original Bloody Sunday. For some in the Gaelic community, the Queen’s visit was a step too far: representatives of five of the six counties of Northern Ireland declined invitations. Yet much of the sting had been taken out of this moment four years earlier, when the English rugby team visited Croke Park in an unprecedented display of sporting ecumenism by the GAA, which had previously been vehemently opposed to hosting “foreign” sports, let alone the British themselves. (The English had the good grace to be roundly beaten.) There was no apology when the Queen visited, but the event in itself was profoundly symbolic.
Then, at the former seat of British power in Ireland, Dublin Castle, the Queen opened her speech at the state banquet with a simple gesture of staggering efficacy. “A Úachtaráin agus a chairde,” she began, in Irish, in an accent at least as good as that of the absent Gerry Adams. That means, simply, “President and friends.” In her reaffirmation of Irish sovereignty, and in her repeated gestures of friendship and even humility, Elizabeth II has endeared herself to many who would have thought themselves immune. It may, perhaps, prove possible to be a republican and a royalist.
***
Postscript: If there was one figure obviously missing at the state banquet for the Queen, it was the former Taoiseach (prime minister), Garret FitzGerald. FitzGerald orchestrated the breakthrough in relations between the two states, with Margaret Thatcher, in the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which paved the way for the Downing Street declaration of 1993, and ultimately the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
FitzGerald had been seriously ill for a couple of weeks (as recently as mid April, I interviewed him on the subject of Irish political reform, and found him hale, hearty and of typically acute mind), and he sadly died last night. The former president, Mary Robinson—a close personal friend of FitzGerald—said his death at the time of both the Queen’s visit and general economic crisis could be “an extraordinary gift,” in serving to “remind us of the goodness in him that was the best of us.”
“He was a statesman more than a politician,” she said, who “mentored the values that we need to think more about” in Irish life. Since his retirement from party politics, he returned to his former role as a commentator and academic; in recent years, he produced a series of articles on the economic crisis, for the Irish Times, that were incisive, instructive and sobering. He was a public intellectual of extraordinary capacity and breadth. As is said, in Irish: Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal (may his noble soul be at the right hand of God).
