IN DIPLOMACY, as in most things in life, timing is everything. Before this week’s moving and resonant state visit of Queen Elizabeth II, it was reasonable to suggest that it should have happened long ago. With so much of the hard work of reconciliation already done, how could a visit now be more than a stilted formality? With the national mood so much more gloomy than it was a decade ago, how could it be more than a distraction from the real issues with which Ireland is grappling?
And yet the timing turned out to be right in two distinct ways. Coming as it did on the back of so much progress already made, the Queen’s visit could be much bolder, more daring – and therefore much more meaningful – than almost anyone expected. The visit could have been formal, decorative and bland. It is enormously to the Queen’s credit that she did what every instinct imbued by her upbringing tells her not to do: she took risks. She knowingly walked on to dangerous ground, consciously evoking memories of Ireland’s bloody uprisings against imperial rule, of the bitter sacrifice of Gallipoli and the Somme, of Bloody Sunday in 1920. She confronted these memories with a dignity, a humility and a simplicity that embodied her own memorable phrase about “being able to bow to the past, but not be bound by it”.
The Queen’s warm and dignified respectfulness achieved something remarkable. Before the visit, it would have seemed that the priority was to avoid emotion. If feelings were to be stirred up, they could only be those of bitterness and anger. Yet, at the moment she laid her wreath at the Garden of Remembrance, the Queen helped to release – to the surprise of most Irish people – a very different set of emotions: sorrow for the sufferings of the past, relief that they are over, hope for a decent future.
The other way in which the timing of the visit proved to be opportune is that it came when national self-confidence is at a very low ebb. There were superficial boosts to that confidence. The organisation of the visit was superb. Most of the worldwide media coverage was, for a change, positive. The banks were, for one week at least, knocked off our front pages. The warmth of the welcome for the Queen, as a person and as a symbol, was not tainted by fawning submissiveness. Our own elected President more than held her own in eloquence and charisma beside the most famous woman in the world.
But beyond these temporary fillips, the visit had a deeper impact on Ireland’s consciousness in these dark times. The loss of economic sovereignty implicit in the bailout deal has done a great deal of damage to Irish pride in being an independent nation. It meant a lot that the embodiment of the old imperial power behaved with such exquisite courtesy towards the symbols of that independence. The historical ironies in Anglo-Irish relationships have tended to be nasty ones, but here was a pleasant paradox. It took a British queen to remind us that we are still a free, sovereign country, equal to any other. That was, after all the complications of our mutual history, a deeply friendly act.