Four years before Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, Ireland relinquished its status as a British dominion under the British monarch. Taoiseach Éamon de Valera wanted nothing to do with the ceremony and republicans threatened to bomb cinemas showing newsreels of it.
Fast forward 70 years and, in the week Ireland was divided in 1921, the republic’s top officials attend Saturday’s coronation of King Charles III. So are Northern Irish politicians who want to end British rule of the region and whose former ally, the IRA, blew up the King’s “honorary grandfather”, Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Beyond rites and rituals, Britain’s first coronation of the post-empire era will calmly tackle the tangled legacy of colonialism and the crown on its neighboring island.
Ruled from London for 800 years, Ireland today it is a European republic as confident and rich as it was poor and introverted at the time of its independence in 1922.
northern Ireland retains majority support for stay in the UKyet support for the once ‘Loyal Ulster’ monarchy is sagging and that of the region long-term future perhaps it has never seemed more uncertain.
After the Netflix series The crown and Prince Harry’s best-selling memoir Replacement successes in Ireland, viewers should tune in in droves on Saturday to watch the coronation live on national broadcaster RTÉ.
BBC television could be seen – in between suspicion of bias – in Ireland in 1953, but RTÉ TV hadn’t even launched. Mary Kenny, author of Crown and Trefoil: Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy, she recalls her Catholic aunt and uncle surreptitiously attending the newsreel viewing of the coronation, which was allowed – with discretion – to Protestants given their historical allegiance to the monarchy. His uncle’s job as a senior civil servant could have been harmed if word got out that he had attended.
There was no such cheating for Michelle O’Neillpending prime minister in Northern Ireland from Sinn Fein, a party once allied with the republican IRA paramilitaries who fought to oust the British. The region’s 30-year conflict has also involved loyalist armed groups and the British Army in atrocities.
Crown and conflict are intertwined: the IRA assassinated the King’s beloved great-uncle Lord Mountbatten in 1979, but Charles is the chief colonel of the Parachute Regiment, whose “wrongful and unjustifiable” killing of 13 civilians the Blood Sunday suggested to historical apology from London in 2010.
Sinn Féin, already the most popular party in the republic, is now also the largest in a Northern Ireland designed for permanent Protestant majority rule and where – also once unthinkable – Catholics now outnumber Protestants.
“I am an Irish republican. I also recognize that there are many people on our island for whom the coronation is an extremely important occasion,” O’Neill said, explaining her decision to go.
Representing Ireland is Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, whose Indian heritage, like that of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is linked to the empire Varadkar’s uncles fought to the bitter end – and President Michael D Higgins. Ireland’s head of state in 2021 declined an invitation to a religious ceremony to mark the centenary of partition, saying the wording was not “neutral”.
The novel inserting an audience on Saturday”oath of allegianceThe new king puzzled many in the UK, but for the new Irish Free State in 1922, it was a casus belli that sparked civil war, Kenny tells me.
Today, not only are the enemies of the Civil War in coalition, but Ireland’s relaxed attitude towards the coronation is “an incredible quantum leap,” he says. A survey last week found that half of Northern Ireland’s population either opposes or is indifferent to their monarchy.
The King is expected to make his first official trip to Ireland after his coronation in early June. People here have a lot of red, white and blue flags, but it’s from last month emotional homecoming by US President Joe Biden, Ireland’s top foreign investor.
“I guess royalty is no longer seen as a ruling caste,” says Kenny. “They’re celebrities now.”
jude.webber@ft.com
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