Queen welcomes Higgins; both pledge new era of friendship, cooperation
The Columbian
Published: April 8, 2014, 5:00pm
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LONDON — Amid regal pomp at Queen Elizabeth II’s Windsor Castle home, the Irish president and the British monarch have begun Ireland’s first state visit to Britain with expressions of mutual affection and respect — and a shared determination to consign national hatreds to a sorrow-tinged past.
President Michael D. Higgins, Ireland’s elfin head of state, was guest of honor at a royal banquet that brought together former enemies in Northern Ireland and leading politicians and celebrities of Britain and Ireland, including Judi Dench and Daniel Day-Lewis. Gathered together on one massive 160-seat table, they heard the queen and Higgins pledge to lead their nations into a new era of friendship.
Higgins’ trip — on his country’s first state visit to Britain since Ireland won independence nearly a century ago — underscores how much the success of Northern Ireland peacemaking has transformed wider relations between the two longtime adversaries since the 1990s, when Irish Republican Army car bombs were still detonating in London.
It comes three years after the queen, defying threats from IRA splinter groups still seeking to wreck the peace, made her own inaugural visit to the Republic of Ireland, where a British monarch last visited in 1911, when all of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom.
As she toasted the health of the Irish nation, Elizabeth said she had loved her Irish visit and found it “even more pleasing since then that we, the Irish and British, are becoming good and dependable neighbors and better friends, finally shedding our inhibitions about seeing the best in each other.”
The queen managed a rare joke as she lauded the role of Irish immigrants in Britain’s public, academic and cultural life. She recalled her own surprise role in the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, when she performed in a film alongside James Bond star Daniel Craig — before a stuntman dressed as the monarch parachuted live into the stadium.
“It took someone of Irish descent, Danny Boyle, to get me to jump from a helicopter,” she said to laughter, referring to the show’s director.
More significantly, the queen criticized how Irish immigrants to Britain used to experience “discrimination and a lack of appreciation.” She said a peaceful future would require Britain and Ireland to be “respectful of each other’s nationhood, sovereignty and traditions, cooperating to our mutual benefit, at ease in each other’s company. After so much checkered history, the regrettable pain of which is still felt by many of us, this goal is now within reach.”
Higgins, a left-wing politician, poet and human rights activist who was elected to the ceremonial post in 2011, said the two nations’ relationship had gone “from the doubting eyes of estrangement to the trusting eyes of partnership and, in recent years, to the welcoming eyes of friendship.”
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