‘Four days that changed relations’: former ambassador recalls queen’s visit to Ireland

The man who served as British ambassador to Ireland during Queen Elizabeth’s 2011 State visit said it was “four days that changed the way the two countries saw each other”.

Remembering the visit in the wake of her death last week, Sir Julian King said two moments stood out for him from the visit, the first by a British monarch to the Republic.

He remembered the “spontaneous roar” when the queen and then president Mary McAleese took to the stage at the end of the variety performance he hosted at the Convention Centre in Dublin on the third day of the visit.

“It was sort of unexpected. There was some polite applause and then they went up on the stage and there was literally a sort of roar from the room,” he told The Irish Times.

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“That was very emotional for everyone who was there. It was sort of a release of a feeling that people realised that they could feel positive about this visit.”

The other thing that stood out for King was the contrast in noise on the streets between the “tense start of the visit” when the queen visited the Garden of Remembrance with a large police presence and a police helicopter hovering overhead and the end of the visit when thousands of happy onlookers lined the streets in Cork to cheer and welcome the monarch.

On the second day, the queen won praise for speaking Irish at the start of her speech at the State banquet at Dublin Castle when she said: “A Uachtaráin, agus a chairde.” (President, and friends.).

The line was famously written out phonetically by McAleese on an old envelope for former British diplomat Francis Campbell, a college friend of the president’s, when he asked her to suggest, in advance of her visit, something the queen might say in Dublin.

King recalled that the queen was “very interested” in speaking some Irish in her speech and “committed to trying to send a signal.”

“I also remember that there was a member of the queen’s entourage who was a native Irish speaker and it may be that there were a few minutes before the speech where they spent a few moments together checking that it would be perceived correctly,” he said.

He recalled the queen was also very keen to send a signal right at the start of the visit by laying a wreath and bowing her head at the Garden of Remembrance, a place dedicated to those who died fighting the British for Irish freedom.

The former diplomat, who served as ambassador in Dublin from 2009 to 2012 and later as ambassador to France, said the visit “exceeded expectations” and left those involved in the visit becoming “quite emotional” during it.

“There was there was clear sense that not only were we doing something that was really important about remembering the past, remembering history and paying respects to it, but actually we were also making a little bit of history as well,” he said.

Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, had wanted to visit for a very long time and that the warmth of the welcome was “so palpable and strong” that the royal couple “visibly enjoyed it,” said King.

He recalled the queen telling then taoiseach Enda Kenny at the end of the visit that it was one of the most memorable visits she had made during her long reign.

The former diplomat, who later served as Britain’s last European Union commissioner before Brexit, said the State visit had “political implications” as it laid the path for the queen to meet Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a former IRA leader, for the first time the following year in Belfast.

“It paved the way for them, including Prince and now King Charles, to engage in developing really close links with a country that they clearly love,” he said.

“I think that is going to continue into the future.”