BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Queen Elizabeth II and Irish President Mary McAleese shook hands on Northern Ireland soil for the first time Thursday – a symbolic milestone following years of peacemaking in this long-disputed British territory.
The British monarch and the Republic of Ireland’s head of state chatted and posed together at Hillsborough Castle, outside Belfast, for an occasion that would have provoked hostility within Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority just a few years ago.
But their trouble-free meeting became inevitable once Ireland dropped its territorial claim to Northern Ireland as part of the landmark Good Friday peace accord of 1998.
It also fueled speculation that the queen soon could 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.
No British monarch has visited the territory of the modern-day Republic of Ireland since 1911 – a decade before the island’s partition into a mostly Protestant north that remained within the United Kingdom, and a predominantly Catholic rest of Ireland that gradually gained full independence from Britain.
The queen didn’t comment. But McAleese later called it “a very special day for Anglo-Irish relationships” that had brought forward the day when the queen would visit the Irish Republic.
McAleese said the queen’s arrival in the republic would signal “the final confirmation of the peace process in Northern Ireland. … Things are going in the right direction, so the day gets nearer.”
Before their meeting, the queen toured a new elementary school in the village of Hillsborough, where students were told to expect an important visitor – and Molly Newell, celebrating her seventh birthday, got to hand the queen a bouquet.
“She said, ‘Happy birthday,’ and I gave her some flowers,” Molly said. “I never knew I was going to have to do a curtsey until this morning. My teacher taught me.”
McAleese, a Belfast-born Catholic, has 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.
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 were killed when the IRA blew up his private boat near his castle in County Sligo, western Ireland.
Associated Press
Irish President Mary McAleese greets Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday at Hillsborough Castle in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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