HM Queen Elizabeth II
In May 2011, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England came to Ireland on a four-day visit. It had promised to be the most toe-curling event in Irish history, and so it proved. It was worse than the time back in 1995 when Prince Charles came and the sitting Taoiseach had declared the occasion ‘the happiest day of my life’. For this time, it was the happiest day of everyone’s life.
Or so at least it seemed, if you had the misfortune to be listening to the radio or could not avoid passing in the vicinity a television set. All day long they kept the seats in the broadcast studios warm for one another as they came to speak about watching the Queen of England in Dublin with tears in their eyes. You would think it was the first time a British monarch had caused Irish people to cry. They called her ‘The Queen’. They talked about their humility in the face of this great occasion. They talked about how surprised they had been by their own emotions, about how tolerant they felt, and humble. They talked about the way she had smiled at them, and they had clapped her to the rafters for smiling at them. They said it was a historic moment, a sign of ‘our maturity as a nation’, how it marked a new point of departure in our ‘shared history’ with ‘our nearest neighbour’. It showed, they said, that we had ‘finally transcended narrow nationalism’ and taken our place among the nations of the Earth.
But it was not just one day, or even two. For four long days there was no rest and no escape from it. They talked about the way she had waved at them, as though waving at people was not her job and she had not been doing it for nearly seventy years. They parsed and analysed her laying of a wreath in the Garden of Remembrance, comparing it to the way she might normally have laid a wreath in a different place on a different occasions. Had she bowed lower than usual? Definitely, they thought.
Dozens of witness, humble and tolerant, came forward to tell how some relative of theirs, an aunt or uncle, had gone to England in the 1940s or 1950s and been given work there, or encountered social democracy, or got a smile from a passing man in a bowler hat. The implication was that there were no jobs, social democracy or bowler hats to be found at home. Everyone was too humble and tolerant to observe that the reason for there being neither jobs nor social democracy at home was because our bowler-hatted ‘nearest neighbours’ had stamped all over Irish civilization for eight hundred years.
Half of Dublin was closed off and inaccessible for the duration. The ‘ordinary’ people were not invited, although some of them turned out anyway to give the Queen someone to wave at. One woman on the radio told how her sister was out jogging with friends in Phoenix Park and the guards had asked them to wave at the Queen as her Land Rover drove past because there was nobody else around to do it.
The only visible dissent was from the toothless irredentists from Eivigi, who rampaged briefly, dressed in Man-U T-shirts, displaying their indifference to royalty and irony in equal measure.
In Cork, Elizabeth, buoyed up to find herself in a place once called ‘Queenstown’, broke away and spoke to some ‘ordinary’ people. The commentators in Dublin wept and wailed. What humility everyone was showing. What maturity!
At a State dinner in her honour in Dublin Castle, the Queen of England spoke about the ‘painful legacy’ affecting Ireland and Britain. She spoke about ‘the complexity’ and ‘the weight’ of ‘our history’. She spoke, too, about the importance of being able ‘to bow to the past but not being bound by it’.
She said that it was ‘a sad and regrettable reality’ that through history ‘our two islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss. The events have touched us all, many of us personally, and are a painful legacy. We can never forget those who have died or been injured, or their families.’
‘With the benefit of historical hindsight’, she said, ‘we can all see things we wish had been done differently or not at all’.
It was as though the eight hundred years had been a minor prang at the traffic lights and both parties had shaken hands and agreed to do their own repairs.
The Dublin elite, speaking for the whole country, cooed and oohed. They talked about the way the Queen of England had pronounced five words in the Irish language, ‘A Uachtaráin agus a chairde’, ‘like a native speaker’ causing the President, who was normally a sensible woman, to go ‘Wow!’
It was as if they had always suspected Queen Elizabeth’s great love for the Irish language and, now, here was the proof of it for all to hear! Listen! She is speaking our awful, unworthy language, the one we hate and which once her predecessors had tried to persuade us to abandon in our own interests! What tolerance! What humility! No one was impolite enough to remark on the fact that Queen Elizabeth had avoided using the word ‘ocras’.
One newspaper carried the headline, ‘Friends and Equals’, seemingly oblivious to the possibility that ‘equal’s’ feel no necessity to declare themselves as such, but nobody voiced such an intolerant thought.
Everyone went home, tired but happy, self-confident, humble, tolerant and mature. How wonderful it was that, after eight hundred years of our insubordination and disrespect, the Queen of England had come to forgive us.
The Cromwell family was not represented.