The BBC‘s Northern Ireland correspondent says the historic trip is intended as a gesture to reassure the province’s unionists, while at the same time trying not to alienate the nationalist population.
The Queen is invited to Armagh by the authorities to present the royal charter renewing Armagh’s status as a city.
In her speech, the Queen addresses all the people of Northern Ireland. She says, “For many difficult years the people of Northern Ireland have shown courage and compassion of an extraordinary kind. Today as they begin to look towards a more peaceful future, Armagh with its two great cathedrals standing so close together presents a powerful symbol of the strength spirit and hopes of people across Northern Ireland.”
Cardinal Cahal Daly says the Queen’s visit is a tribute to the progress made in the peace process since the IRA ceasefire came into effect on August 31, 1994.
Arbishop Robin Eames says, “Look how far we’ve come in a year. It’s a message of symbolism. Be patient, we’ve a long, long way to go but today is one little part of that jigsaw.”
Hendron says, “Things are different now. People must stand up and be counted. You can’t hide in your home. There are two communities here and I think it’s important to go out and shake hands with people like the Queen and from my point of view, she’s very welcome.”
Queen Elizabeth II spends the last of her four days in Ireland visiting Cork on May 20, 2011, where she once again is greeted warmly. Despite initial concerns about security, the visit proves to be a huge success for both countries. The Queen’s apology at Dublin Castle for the treatment her government meted out to Ireland over many years is received with enormous positive, emotional response.
Large crowds line the streets in Cork city centre and the Queen is given a tour of the city’s English Market by the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terry Shannon. She meets some stall owners and speaks to members of the public after she leaves the market. There is a carnival atmosphere on the streets of Cork and the visit is more relaxed than many engagements in Dublin.
The Queen indicates she would like to return to Ireland for another visit. TaoiseachEnda Kenny says he invited her to return as she boarded her flight at Cork Airport. Kenny says the Queen told him she and the royal party enjoyed the visit. He pays tribute to everyone involved in the State visit. He says Ireland responded magnificently to the visit, from the President right down to ordinary people, who showed restraint and understanding.
Kenny says the Queen had received a real Irish welcome, which he says demonstrates the importance of a new beginning for both islands. He says that Ireland has measured up to the highest global standards and the county can be proud.
Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign AffairsEamon Gilmore says the visit has enhanced Ireland’s reputation abroad at a time when there are only negative headlines. He says that, because of the visit, the world is finally getting a picture of a country that does things well and that is working through its difficulties.
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams says that, while expressing concerns about Queen Elizabeth’s visit, he also hopes some good will come from it.
At Cork Airport she walks to her plane passing an army guard of honour and Taoiseach Enda Kenny is there to bid her farewell. The plane departs bringing an end to her four-day State visit.
(From: “Queen Elizabeth II concludes Irish visit,” RTÉ.ie, the website of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, May 20, 2011)
For much of the 20th century, relations between Ireland and its nearest neighbour are cool. Temperatures drop significantly over the economic war in the 1930s and Ireland’s neutrality in World War II. The sense of unfinished business permeates diplomacy during the Troubles, but by 1990 there is significant warmth in trade, tourism, business and even politics.
The newly elected Robinson makes a big play of reaching out to Irish emigrants and sees the opportunity to help Anglo-Irish relations. And so, on her 49th birthday, she pops in for tea with the British head of state.
None of Robinson’s predecessors had set foot in Britain, other than to change planes. Even when President Patrick Hillery is invited to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, he is advised by the Government of Ireland to decline the invitation.
But Robinson decides she will not be pushed around, and successfully insists she be allowed to join other heads of state at the opening of a European bank in London. Next she asks the government if she might be able to travel to the University of Cambridge to deliver a speech and receive an honorary degree. It is only after he reluctantly agrees that TaoiseachCharlie Haughey realises that the Chancellor of the University is the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip.
Robinson meets the royal, the world remains on its axis, and a precedent is set. “Partly because I’ve never been fazed by royalty of any kind, least of all the British royal family, I felt entirely relaxed,” she recalls in her authorised biography.
Robinson next meets the prince at a memorial service for the victims of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing in Warrington, where she is applauded as she leaves the church. Soon, she is meeting royals all over the place, at rugby matches and memorial ceremonies, and in a television interview says that she would like to meet the Queen.
By February 1993, Haughey has been replaced by Albert Reynolds and he grants permission for Robinson to travel for a strictly personal visit. The visit does not happen in a vacuum – Reynolds is in secret discussions with Republicans that would end in the IRA ceasefire – and the Taoiseach is keen not to give any suggestion that this is a State visit, which would require a reciprocal visit.
Robinson’s party arrives at Buckingham Palace at 4:55 PM on May 27 where they are greeted by the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes. Robinson’s staff pushes the Palace to allow press photographers, reckoning that a historic moment should be captured.
Robinson, in an Ib Jorgensen fuchsia suit, later donated to Madame Tussauds waxworks, and her husband Nick are brought up to the first floor to meet the Queen for a friendly and informal tea party that lasts 30 minutes. They sip a blend of Chinese and India tea in Minton cups, exchange signed photographs of themselves, and discuss the prospects for peace. The President also hands over an extra present of a hand-turned wooden cup from Spiddal.
Afterwards, the ground-breaking photographs are taken and published all over the world, including the front page of the Irish Independent. “Palace Talks Prepare Way for State Visit” runs the lead headline over a piece by Bernard Purcell and Gene McKenna. They go on, reporting the President as saying the visit is “symbolic of the maturing relationship between Ireland and Britain.”
In 1996 President Robinson’s 15th visit to Britain is upgraded to an Official Visit, and she leaves office the following year.
Robinson’s successor, Mary McAleese, takes things further, and meets Queen Elizabeth II several times in London and at World War I commemorations on the continent. In May 2011 McAleese welcomes Queen Elizabeth II on her four-day State Visit to Ireland and in April 2014 President Michael D. Higgins makes the first State Visit to the UK.
(Pictured: President Mary Robinson with the Queen outside Buckingham Palace in 1993. Photo: Eamonn Farrell/Photocall Ireland | “Flashback 1993: The first Irish head of state meeting with a British monarch” by Ger Siggins, Independent.ie, May 22, 2016)
The British monarch and the Republic of Ireland‘s head of state chat and pose together at Hillsborough Castle, outside Belfast, for an occasion that would have provoked hostility within Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority just a few years earlier. But their trouble-free meeting becomes inevitable once Ireland dropped its territorial claim to Northern Ireland as part of the landmark Good Friday Agreement peace accord of 1998. The visit also fuels speculation the queen could soon make her first official visit to the neighboring Republic of Ireland, where the Irish Republican Army assassinated Lord Louis Mountbatten, the uncle of her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
No British monarch has visited the territory of the modern-day Republic of Ireland since George V visited Dublin in 1911, a decade before the island’s partition into a mostly Protestant north that remains within the United Kingdom, and a predominantly Catholic rest of Ireland that gradually gains full independence from Britain.
Camera crews are allowed to film the moment, but not record the sound, when McAleese shakes the queen’s hand at the start of a 20-minute meeting, their fourth since 1998. Previous meetings occurred at Buckingham Palace and on a World War I battlefield site. McAleese later calls it “a very special day for Anglo-Irish relationships” that brings forward the day when the queen will visit the Irish Republic.
McAleese, a Belfast-born Catholic, had made scores of visits to Northern Ireland since being elected to the Irish Republic’s largely symbolic presidency in 1997. As part of her presidential theme of “building bridges,” she regularly invites Protestant groups to her official Dublin mansion and has built impressive diplomatic contacts with northern Protestants.
Before McAleese’s arrival, visits north by an Irish president were rare events that drew public protests from Protestants, who demanded that Ireland remove its territorial claim from its 1937 constitution. The republic’s voters overwhelmingly supported this in a May 1998 referendum, an action completed in December 1999.
The queen has avoided traveling to the Irish Republic, in part, because of security fears following the IRA assassination of Mountbatten in August 1979. He, his daughter-in-law and two teenage boys are killed when the IRA blows up his private boat near his castle in County Sligo. However, Prince Philip and their son, Prince Charles, make several visits to the Irish Republic in the decade following the IRA’s 1994 cease-fire.
seamus dubhghaill 