So nice to see the Daily Telegraphtaking such a positive approach to her majesty's visit to Éire. There was a time when they took a dim view of these sort of jaunts to the Republic.
On the eve of Ronald Reagan’s trip to Ireland in 1984, the Telegraph published an extraordinary leading article dismissing it as “a patronising charade”. President Reagan, opined the leader, would endure “very much what the queen suffers in New Guinea”.
It’s worth running in all its jaw-dropping glory:
“A QUICK STOPOVER.
“America is a country notably populated by Irishmen who got away. More than one in four American presidents has been drawn from that island, but most of them from Ulster, and Protestant Ulster at that. However, all American presidents come back (invariably to the Republic) for a short festival of mutual insincerity. In some blameless bog-hamlet it will have been discovered by a busily sub-contracting Debrett, that the great grandfather – on his mother’s side – of President Geltbrenner first drew breath. Air Force One will arrive. A plastic pageant will be enacted in which the hands of aged women who may be related to the President’s grandmother are shaken, some form of native entertainment is staged involving fiddles and the artificially respirated Gaelic tongue. It will be accomplished to the clicking tongues and monitored wristwatches of skedyule-keeping young men with the imagination of bollards who are, broadly speaking, in charge.
"In a good year it may generate a little tourist traffic and a few votes. But we, the English, remain deeply grateful that this patronising charade is not systematically visited on us. The hairs at the back of the neck still stand on edge at President Carter in Newcastle saying 'Ha'way the lads'. The thought must have occurred to intelligent Irishmen that they are the luckless object of a piece of pure colonial pageantry. A president in Ireland endures in the name of public relations very much what the Queen suffers in New Guinea. Adlai Stephenson, a trifle to the Left of the Daily Telegraphbut still the best man in 200 years not to become President, was once compelled by dreadful young men in marketing to wear for a visit to the Mid-West full redskin outfit, feathered headdress and all! 'Please,' he said, taking off the feathers, 'let's try to get some dignity into this business.'
“Now, in fairness, Mr Reagan, who wishes nobody any harm and whose great glory is a sort of affable, easy-going goodwill, is
likely to carry off the nonsense wished on him as decently as it can be, but isn’t the age of the Durbar behind us?”
The Durbar is a reference to the lavish ceremonial gatherings held by the elite in India at the height of the British Raj to celebrate the coronations of their emperor or empress.
