BELFAST – There’s no mistaking the genuine warmth of the tributes paid to Queen Elizabeth by leaders from across the Irish political spectrum.
In Belfast, Sinn Fein said she led by example, whilst the Democratic Unionists called her visit to the Irish Republic a decade ago “groundbreaking”.
In Dublin, the Taoiseach Micheal Martin described her as an “exceptional woman” and her counterpart as Head of State, President Michael D. Higgins, dubbed her a “remarkable friend of Ireland”.
Indeed an opinion poll published just three months ago in Dublin’s Sunday Independent recorded a higher approval rating for Queen Elizabeth – at 50 per cent – than for any of the Irish parliamentary party leaders.
The Queen could always count on the enthusiastic loyalty of unionists in Northern Ireland, coupled with a wider fascination which accompanied her celebrity status.
But her marked popularity amongst many avowed Irish nationalists is a more recent phenomenon.
In 1966, cameras captured Queen Elizabeth looking shocked when a brick hurled from the roof of a building bounced off the bonnet of her Royal car as she drove through the streets of Belfast.
After “the Troubles” broke out later that decade, worse was to come. The Queen’s family were subjected to many threats from the IRA, culminating in the assassination of Earl Mountbatten as he took a boat trip off the coast of County Sligo in 1979, a remote control bombing which shook the Royal Family to its core.
The IRA murder of his favourite great-uncle made Charles feel “as if the foundations of all we held dear in life had been torn apart irreparably”. But it also helped him “understand the agonies borne by so many others in these islands”.
Queen Elizabeth did not return to Northern Ireland for a decade after Lord Mountbatten’s death. However, with the development of a peace process in the 1990s, she channelled her loss into a determination to promote reconciliation.
This led to her four day visit to the Irish Republic in 2011, the first such visit by a British monarch in a hundred years.
The former Irish President Mary McAleese, remembers those four days as “magical”, a “pilgrimage of sorts” and “a mission of forgiveness”.
Queen Elizabeth got a warm reception on a walkabout in Cork and accompanied President McAleese laying wreaths in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance – a mark of respect to the leaders of the 1916 rebellion, many of whom were executed after rising up against the forces of the British crown.
In Dublin Castle, once the HQ for British rule, the Queen began her speech at a state banquet with the Irish phrase “A Uachtarain agus a chairde [President and friends]”, a simple linguistic gesture which prompted an audible “wow” from her hosts.
With a studied understatement Queen Elizabeth admitted British Irish relations hadn’t always been “entirely benign” adding that with the benefit of hindsight “we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all”.
Her carefully worded address set the scene for an encounter the following year in Belfast when the Queen shook hands with Northern Ireland’s then Deputy First Minister, the former IRA commander Martin McGuinness.
Since Brexit there’s been a tug of war over Northern Ireland’s trading status and relations between Dublin and London have nosedived.
Unionists are currently boycotting Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government in protest over the creation of an economic border down the Irish Sea, which they believe dilutes their British identity.
Liz Truss’s pledge to overturn that trade border has prompted Irish and EU representatives to accuse the UK of demonstrating bad faith.
Against this gloomy backdrop, Queen Elizabeth’s pride in what she dubbed the “lasting rapport” between the UK and Ireland seems a reminder of a bygone age.
For all their admiration for her, many Irish nationalists will view the Queen’s passing as a further weakening of the ties that bind the United Kingdom together, potentially hastening the day they might achieve the United Ireland they crave.
King Charles III has visited many parts of Ireland and shaken the hands of leaders including Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams.
He clearly wants to continue Elizabeth’s work but will be mindful of the constraints which go with his new job.
Despite the latest tensions, the former Irish President Mary McAleese thinks Charles can transcend the political strife and follow his mother’s example by fostering a sense of “good neighbourliness” between the people of these islands.
Certainly, with memories of his great uncle’s murder and his mother’s willingness to stretch out a hand of friendship to those who justified that assassination never far from his mind, the new King won’t need reminding of the vital human importance of what’s at stake.
Mark Devenport is the former BBC Northern Ireland political editor and has reported from Northern Ireland since 1986.
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