Mr and Mrs Queen visit Ireland

Mr and Mrs Queen

The Queen of England starts her historic trip to the Republic of Ireland today and becomes the first British monarch to make the visit in 100 years. Relations between Britain and Ireland were transformed by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 which began to heal some of the divisions after centuries of distrust.

I, for one, welcome this visit and the message it gives that we in Britain and Ireland are two mature independent states who can engage in normal relations without having the impossible burden of a torturous and fraught history restricting our every move. As a Republican living in England I find myself relatively relaxed about the British Monarchy. First and foremost it is a Constitutional Monarchy which provides continuity and a sense of National occasion, witness the recent Royal Wedding.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2011/04/ones-first-wedding.html

Secondly, if you discount the nauseating snobbery of entry to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, much of the snobbery and class patronage around the Monarchy has disappeared. So the Monarchy weighs somewhat lightly on the corpus of the UK and the Queen and Prince Philip are greatly admired as a couple who have discharged their duty to the country without fault. Governments have to enjoy a consensus of the people they represent. The British consensus is overwhelmingly that they prefer the historical continuity, dignity and presence of the Monarchy to represent their country and provide the bedrock of their Constitution. It is ultimately their call so who am I to disagree? This does not make me a monarchist but a relaxed Republican living in a fairly non-intrusive constitutional monarchy.



Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne have all visited Ireland in a private capacity and have been welcomed. The Queen as a person is widely admired but she enjoys particular respect because of the example of her mother. Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, was like her daughter a great follower of the turf and a regular racegoer at Cheltenham where she always made a particular point of talking to Irish punters, trainers and jockeys. Every St. Patricks Day, without fail, until the last year of her life she made a point of presenting shamrock to the Irish Guards, one of the four Guards foot regiments which protect the Soverign.

The British Royal Family has been personally touched by the fascism at the heart of the IRA’s murderous campaign to bomb those who disagree with them into a “United Ireland.” There was a widespread sense of shame in Ireland when Lord Mountbatten was killed by a bomb in August 1979 on his small pleasure boat in Sligo Bay, a vicious murder which also killed two young boys, Nicholas Knatchbull, 14, and Paul Maxwell, 15, a local employed as a boat boy, and the Dowager Lady Brabourne, 83, who died the day after the attack. What bravery it took Thomas McMahon and his co-conspirators to carry out this massacre of innocents on what I remember as a beautiful summer’s day?


Classiebawn Castle


Lord Mountbatten's funeral

Lord Mountbatten was of course the softest of targets. His wife’s family had owned Classiebawn castle and when Mountbatten sold it to Hugh Tunney he rented it back every August and holidayed there with his extended family. The local police kept watch on Classiebawn Castle for the one month a year Lord Mountbatten spent there. But his boat was left unguarded in the public dock in Mullaghmore where it was moored.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/05/death-of-brian-keenan.html

This was an “imperialist” who had dismantled Britain’s imperial empire, who was a good friend to Ireland and sympathised with the aspiration to Irish unity. He even used to insist on travelling on the Irish car ferry company B & I where he was well known to the crew who were working class stock from the docklands of Dublin. Mountbatten, as a former naval officer, used to go on the bridge and chat easily to the crew the way old salt’s do. These were “hard men” from Dublin’s docklands and they would not hear a bad word said about Mountbatten. Prince Charles’s first trip to Ireland to Ireland was to the same Casement Airbase the Queen arrived at to collect Lord Mountbatten’s body for burial. Mountbatten was such an arch Imperialist that the most xenophobic of countries, Burma, declared a week’s official mourning.

What happened the next St Patrick’s Day and at the Cheltenham race meeting the year after Lord Louis Mountbatten's murder? The Queen Mum as always presented shamrock to the Irish Guards and at Cheltenham made even more of a point of speaking to Irish race goers. Like her daughter she was made of stern stuff. When the Queen’s grandson, Prince William, got married recently he wore the dress uniform of the Irish Guards.


Casement Aerodrome

The Queen’s itinerary includes gestures of reconciliation including a wreath-laying ceremony at a Garden of Remembrance for “those who died in the cause of Irish freedom”, and a visit to Croke Park stadium, where British troops opened fire at a Gaelic football match in 1920, killing 14 people, the original Bloody Sunday.

Even the air base where the Queen will land is a reminder of past troubles, as it is formally known as Casement Aerodrome, after Sir Roger Casement, a diplomat who was hanged for treason in 1916 after arranging for Germany to ship arms to Irish Republicans. However his civic achievements are often forgotten – Sir Roger led the enquiries which exposed the horrors of the Belgian Congo and the exploitation of rubber plantation workers on the Putumayo River in the Amazon.


Dublin Castle

The State Dinner for The Queen on Wednesday night will be held in Dublin Castle situated in the heart of historic Dublin. The city gets its name from the Dubh Linn or Black Pool located on the site of the castle's gardens and coach house. Founded in 1204 by King John of England, it was completed in 1230. On 16 January 1922, Michael Collins arrived in the Upper Yard and received the handover of the Castle from the last Lord Lieutenant FitzAlan on behalf of the new Irish government.



Let me at this point tell the story of a gentleman of my acquaintance known as Paddy “Mob Law” O’Connor. I made Paddy’s acquaintance late in his life when he did some decorating work for me and I asked about his unusual nick name “Mob Law.” Turned out Paddy was in the IRA in the 1950’s when newsreels of Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation were being shown in Irish Cinema’s. Paddy and the “lads”, being “diehard’s” raided the cinemas to stop the Irish people collaborating by watching these scandalous newsreels of the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. In one cinema an indignant women stood up and challenged these self appointed gunmen shouting at them “what law gives you the right to do this?” to which Paddy shouted back “Mob Law.” No doubt the rump of the rump will try to enforce mob law over the next few before going back to concentrating on their dole and drug deals. Such is the “Little Irelander” mentality which went with the thought control, censororship, tariff barriers and economic stagnation which meant for many years Ireland’s greatest exports were cattle and people, both exported on the hoof.


The Guinness Air Bar where one will have one's first pint of Uncle Arthur?


Farmleigh House where Mr and Mrs Queen are staying

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2011/01/lady-miranda.html

There is a distinction made by Irish People between the “Crown” in whose name Ireland was ruled and the Royal Family. Indeed the shrill accusations of the rump of rump Republicanism that the Queen is responsible for the actions of “Crown Forces” is about as logical as blaming Barrack Obama as Commander in Chief for the Vietnam War. Indeed, the most vicious military campaign in Ireland was by a Republican called Oliver Cromwell but as he failed on his PR he is not hailed as the father of Irish Republicanism. The institution of the monarchy, because of its association with British military endeavour in Ireland, as distinct from the British people, came to represent for unionists, a touchstone of their loyalty to the United Kingdom but for nationalists, an emblem of unwelcome intervention.



Hostile references to it were presented in the context of historic claims of British monarchy to involvement and control of Irish affairs and a desire to coax the Irish out of their perceived irrational faith (Catholicism) and political allegiances, stretching back to the 12th Century and involving occupation, plantation, war and sectarian strife at various stages.

The Queen’s Grandfather George V was the last British Monarch to visit Ireland in 1911 but “all changed, changed utterly” with World War I which remade Ireland as it did most of Europe and the Middle East. One faction supported John Redmond and his call to fight to secure Home Rule (a degree of self government within the British Empire) and was named the "National Volunteers", the other supported Eoin McNeill and retained the name the "Irish Volunteers". Few could have prophesised how the two Ireland’s would diverge over the next four years.



John Redmond’s call to enlist was heeded by the majority of Irish men who fought for Home Rule and “the defence of small nations” such as Belgium and by extension Ireland, and in the course of the war it is estimated of the 700,000 British military deaths 50,000 were Irish. There are two unique features of the Irish death toll. Firstly, unlike in Britain, there was never conscription in Ireland so every Irish soldier was a volunteer. Secondly, there is no category of “Irish” in the British war records so the number is estimated from the deaths in Irish regiments but also Irish Volunteers, who enrolled in English, Welsh and Scottish regiments. It is notable that proportionately this death toll is as high if not higher than in Britain.

Those who supported Eoin McNeill and the Irish Volunteers formed the nucleus of the 1916 Easter Rising against British Rule, the first major blow by a subject nation against “The Empire on which the sun never sets” and the prelude to Irish Independence being achieved in 1922. This was not independence for all of Ireland as six out of nine counties of the province of Ulster retained the Union with Britain as “Northern Ireland”.

By 1918 with the end of the Great War and the General Election two Ireland’s had emerged. The general election of 1918 was the first (because of the war) since 1910 and the first (because of the Representation of the People Act) where non property owners and women (albeit, aged 30 or over) could vote and is seen as a key defining moment in modern Irish history. With the electorate increasing from 700,000 to two million in Ireland it saw the overwhelming defeat of the moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), which had dominated the Irish political landscape since the 1880’s, and a landslide victory for the radical Sinn Fein party, which had never previously enjoyed such significant electoral success but which now won a decisive majority of 73 out of 105 seats in Ireland. The aftermath of the elections saw the convention of an extra-legal parliament, now known as the First Dail, by the elected Sinn Fein candidates, and the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence.


"We serve neither King nor Kaiser."



By 1922 the Irish Free State was independent and those who had “fought for England” were lambasted as traitors and their sacrifice was largely ignored by the new Irish nation which saw 500,000 people emigrate in the first 5 years of independence. These were a mixture of “loyalists” who did not identify with the “Free State” but also anti-treaty republicans who were on the losing side in the bitter Civil War which followed independence. In Ulster the unnatural partition was reinforced by a Unionist state which practiced a brutal sectarianism on the unwilling nationalists caught within its borders and where the economy of the border areas was destroyed by “Imperial Custom Posts” and cities such as Derry and Newry being cut off from their natural hinterland and declining. In “Ulster” the undoubted bravery and sacrifice of the Ulster regiments was celebrated as a blood sacrifice which proclaimed their loyalty to Britain and their right to union with the “mainland.” Thus the war and its commemoration afterwards served to reinforce and deepen the partition of Ireland and the divisions between the two Irish identities of Nationalism and Unionism.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/towards-somme-personal-journey.html

In Irish towns there are still “British Legion” houses provided for ex-soldiers and their families and in the decades of poverty and economic stagnation many Irish families were quietly grateful for the “War Pensions” they received. Ireland was neutral during the Second World War but many served in the British forces and many also worked in England both to survive and help the war effort including my Grandfather and two uncles who travelled on British Legion travel warrants and worked for the electronics firm Lucas in Birmingham during the war whilst living in a company dormitory. My father at the age of ten and his family on the other hand came in the other direction as refugees from the devastating blitz in Coventry.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/11/moonlight-sonata_14.html

As part of the process of reconciliation in Ireland the Irish Dead of the world wars are now commemorated at a service attended by the President and the Government and this issue which has divided in the past has helped make the distance between Belfast and Dublin shorter and contribute to the process of reconciliation on the island of Ireland.

In 2007 I met the President of Ireland, Professor Mary McAleese, whose ambition was to have the Queen visit at The Longford Lecture that year on “Changing History.” The President warned that the Northern Ireland Executive s faced a huge task in eliminating the "embedded culture of sectarianism." She added: "We are in fact right at the very start of the most exciting chapter ever in the history of the island of Ireland." She said the development has helped the country to "look the past in the face" and approach the future with fresh confidence. "For those of us who have grown up through the Troubles, the reduction in negativity and the growing generosity of spirit has been little short of miraculous."


President of Ireland, Professor Mary McAleese

Her address was interspersed with humour mentioning the historian’s assessment about the difference between our nations that “The Irish never forget and the English never remember.” She commented another academic who suggested that the current developments meant the end of Irish History with “we would be so lucky” and recalled the Russian Proverb “The way ahead is clear, it is the past which is in dispute.” She emphasised the positive and continuing changes in an Ireland which has moved on from its long tradition of emigration to embrace immigration with 12% of the population born outside Ireland and members of the Irish Diaspora returning.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/longford-lecture-2007-changing-history.html

At the question and answer session at the end the journalist Mary Kenny asked her was she aware that the last British Monarch to visit Ireland was George V. Indeed she was said Mary McAleese as she slept in his bedroom every night! She said then that she hoped that The Queen could visit during her term of office. The President’s House, Áras an Uachtaráin, where the Queen was formally welcomed today was formerly the Vice Regal Lodge which was extended for George V’s visit.


Áras an Uachtaráin

I wrote at the time; “Like Frank Longford, an English politician and an Irish patriot, she focussed us on two nations and peoples who have gone from emphasising difference to celebrating what we have in common and building a better future together whilst not ignoring what makes us special. In doing this she has helped us all to move to a better place.”

Or as Bertie Ahern said (am I really quoting him?) in May 2007, when he was the first Irish Taoiseach to address the Houses of Parliament:

"No two nations and no two peoples have closer ties of history and geography and of family and friendship…we are now in a new era of agreement… solidarity has made us stronger. Reconciliation has brought us closer."

So congratulations to Mary McAleese in rounding off her two Presidential terms in fine style with the Queen’s visit. And thanks and gratitude to Mr and Mrs Queen for having the courage to visit when many would have advised against it. Mrs Queen is 85 and Mr Queen will be 90 in July. Respect to them both, they are made of stern stuff.

For all the unrepresentative bleatings of the "die-hards" desperately looking for their last opportunity of some attention this trip required great courage and seals normalisation of relations between two countries and people who, for all their fraught history, have far more in common than they have apart. The future is the only reality.