The Crown represented everything Irish Republicans loathed – but Queen helped find harmony. Now it’s down to the King

SINCE her death, the flood of tributes to the late Queen have been heartfelt and unceasing.

But perhaps none have been more remarkable than that delivered in the Northern Irish Assembly by Michelle O’Neill, the President of Sinn Fein.

PA

King Charles III meeting Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O’Neill at Hillsborough Castle, Co Down[/caption]

In a statement full of generosity, O’Neill heaped praise on Elizabeth II as “courageous and gracious leader”, who had made “a significant contribution to the advancement of peace.”

Ms O’Neill added that in “her relationships with those us who are Irish”, she had shown “warmth, kindness and unfailing courtesy.”

Coming from the senior figure of a Republican organisation that was created as the political wing of the IRA, those words graphically illustrate how Northern Ireland has changed since the end of the Troubles.

Only a few decades ago, such language would have been unthinkable. The Crown represented everything that the Republicans loathed. It was the bedrock of British rule in the province, a symbol of colonialist occupation and a barrier to Irish unity.

Yet today, the Queen is viewed in a very different light, not as a representative of unionism, but as an agent of reconciliation.

Her glowing reputation is based on the repeated efforts she made to cement the peace process which was heralded by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In particular, two duties performed by the Queen had a dramatic impact in the quest for harmony.

The first was her enormously successful state visit to Ireland in 2011, the first by a British sovereign since the country left the United Kingdom in 1921, during which she charmed her hosts not only by giving a toast in Gaelic, but also by her willingness to honour the Irish fallen of previous conflicts, including even the War of Independence against Britain.

The second act of rapprochement came a year later at a theatre in Belfast, where she shook the hand of former IRA Commander Martin McGuinness.

The gesture must have been deeply painful for the Queen, given that she had long been a target for the Republican terrorists, while in 1979 her own beloved cousin Lord Mountbatten was murdered by the IRA in an explosion on his boat off the coast in Co. Sligo, one of the most shocking atrocities in its long, barbarous campaign of violence.

But she was willing to override her personal feelings for the sake of peace.

Same spirit

All the signs are that the new King will show the same spirit. He is well-versed in Northern Ireland’s history, having visited the place no fewer than 39 times as heir to throne.

Like his mother, he has stretched out the hand of friendship even to the hardline Republicans. He was even closer than his mother to Lord Mountbatten, of whose death he said, “a mixture of desperate emotions swept over me: agony, disbelief and a kind of wretched numbness.”

But that did not stop him giving a handshake to Sinn Fein’s boss Gerry Adams when they met at Galway University in 2015.

Indeed, the theme of conciliation was dominant during the visit by Charles III and Camilla, Queen consort  to Northern Ireland yesterday, during which he held an audience at Hillsborough Castle with representatives, of all five of the main local parities, including Sinn Fein.

Even more strikingly, he accepted a message of condolence from Sinn Fein’s Alex Maskey, the speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont.

An ally of Gerry Adams, Maskey is an ex-boxer and a veteran Republican politician who was interned twice in the 1970s for alleged membership of the IRA and in 1983 became the first Sinn Fein member on Belfast City Council since the 1920s.

The sight of this stalwart opponent of British rule paying his fulsome respects to the new King in the historic surroundings of Hillsborough Castle is one of the more incongruous but uplifting images of the week.

It augurs well for the new reign. For more than a century, Ulster was a tortured land.

But now a brighter future beckons, even amid the sorrow caused by the passing of Elizabeth II. The baton of peacemaker now passes to her son.