THE VISIT of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland is a conventional diplomatic event in certain respects. It signals the end of the Troubles, the stabilisation of the political settlement in the North, which allows Ireland to acknowledge the intimacy of the relationship between the two islands. After all, the four prime ministers who governed Britain between 1997 and 2007 - James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair - all acknowledged their Irish ancestry.
In conversations with Sir David Goodall, Thatcher at first claimed to be "completely English", but under questioning acknowledged her "great-grandmother Sullivan". Callaghan wanted Irish officials to be reminded that he had Irish blood. Major, and perhaps more particularly Blair, were not shy of stressing the same inheritance.
Ireland, for its part, adopted British parliamentary norms for its own democracy, with the exception of the Senate which might be said to presage the future form of the House of Lords.
Mary Kenny's essential thesis in her recent book Crown and Shamrock; Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy is that popular Irish attitudes to the British monarchy, while formally based on the acceptance of a radical republican repudiation of the crown as a link between Britain and Ireland, in fact contain a good deal of what is known in Ireland as "sneaking regard".
When Michael Collins was in London negotiating the end of British rule in Ireland in 1921, he was also providing his Irish fiancée Kitty Kiernan with celebrity magazines dominated, then as now, by royal gossip. Irish republicanism has tended to be hostile to the British monarchy not so much because it was a monarchy but because it was British.
One of Kenny's strongest arguments lies in her stress on the way the princes of the Catholic Church replaced the monarchy as an emotional, ceremonial focus in the early days of Irish independence.
The ceremony surrounding the arrival of the Papal Legate, who presided at the 1932 Dublin Eucharistic Congress, was explicitly modelled on royal visits, including a formal reception by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, complete with heralds, at a specially constructed city gate on Merrion Road, Ballsbridge.
On the general European model, it might have been expected that Irish Catholicism, as a hierarchical religion, would align itself with monarchism against republicanism.
Traces of such a preference can be found among upper- and middle-class Catholics and certain sections of the priesthood at the beginning of the 20th century. Cardinal Michael Logue, (Archbishop of Armagh 1887-1924) was well known to favour the continued role of the British crown, since he feared that an Irish republic might be as anti-clerical as its French counterpart.
The most outspoken Irish clerical monarchist was Archbishop John Healy of Tuam, who as auxiliary Bishop of Clonfert in the 1880s had been one of the few bishops to denounce land agitation openly. In 1906 Healy publicly criticised nationalists who refused to drink the king's health, describing Edward VII as king of Ireland de jure as well as de facto and personally deserving loyalty, while criticising the conditional nature of Orange loyalism.
In Healy's notoriously uncritical 1905 Life of St Patrick, he offers an account of how the Antrim chieftain Fergus Mac Erc was rewarded for giving land to St Patrick by a prophesy that his descendants would rule his territory forever. Healy writes: "The blood of Fergus, though greatly diluted by foreign admixtures, still flows in the veins of King Edward VII."
Of the two great leaders of 19th-century Irish nationalism, it was Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant, rather than Daniel O'Connell, a Catholic, who was instinctively more anti-royalist, perhaps in part reflecting the Cromwellian origins of the Parnell family in Ireland. The scholar James Loughlin in his fine study The British Monarchy and Ireland (2007) eloquently draws attention to this irony.
But even Parnell relented and, in July 1889, he abandoned his English radical allies in parliament in order to support an increase in the royal grant.
Edward Pickersgill, the MP for Bethnal Green, and a loyal supporter of Irish nationalism noted his disappointment but added, citing O'Connell's royalism, that he was not surprised. "Chivalric devotions to persons and great respect for hereditary rank have been, and still are, more powerful with the Irish race than they are with ourselves," he said.
But the visit of Queen Elizabeth II has certain jarring moments that are heavy with layers of meaning. Take the visit to the Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork.
Carlowman John Tyndall was one of the great scientists of the 19th century. Despite an early admiration for Thomas Davis of Young Ireland, he was a strong opponent of home rule, as were many members of the Irish scientific community. So much so, that the senior Gladstonian politician William Vernon Harcourt called him that "scientific Orangeman".
His relationship with Ireland was complex. It was Tyndall's address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at Belfast in 1874, arguing for the superior authority of science over religion, that helped stoke up the fires of anti-Darwinism among Irish churches.
The future nationalist leader John Dillon, while a student at the Catholic University in 1874, expressed some interest in Tyndall's views or at least the importance to Irish culture of discussing and evaluating them.
He subsequently retreated from this view, at least publicly, due to the strong opposition from the bishops associated with the Catholic University.
Thus Tyndall strikes one nerve in Irish life, but the question of his role and importance comes up in another context. In 1907 the letters page in Sinn Féin's weekly newspaper discussed whether Tyndall could properly be called an Irishman at all.
In spite of the association of his family with this country over the previous 150 years, one correspondent complained "he cannot be counted as an Irish scientist in that he left the country at an early age and all through his life he distinctly identified with England and with English intellectual progress. We have therefore no more right to claim him as an Irish scientist than we have to claim the Duke of Wellington as an Irish statesman".
Matters have changed since then, partly due to the work of the philosopher Richard Kearney.
Tyndall is now regarded as an authentic and important figure in Irish intellectual life. So much so that the tourist guide Facts about Ireland, in the section called Facts on Irish People, mentions Tyndall before Éamon de Valera. "If you ever wondered who found the reason why the sky was blue it was John Tyndall who claims the credit," it says.
Even more profoundly, the queen's visit comes at a time when Ruairí Quinn, Minister for Education, is publicly promoting schemes for the secularisation of Irish education, which Tyndall would strongly approve of but which amounts to a repudiation of mainstream Catholic nationalist thinking of the 19th and much of the 20th century in many ways.
The Queen's visit to the Guinness Storehouse also stirs memories of the lost world of southern unionism. Daniel O'Connell famously (and unsuccessfully) tried to promote a rival "Catholic" stout against Guinness's "Protestant" beverage.
With somewhat more success, Catholic and nationalist advocates of the view that a sober Ireland was a free Ireland reminded Guinness drinkers that they were unintentionally subsidising the rebuilding of Dublin's Protestant cathedrals and the Guinness family's large donations to Conservative and Unionist party funds.
Even Guinness's work towards slum clearance in Dublin was met with the protest that, without Guinness, there would have been fewer slums to begin with.
These days the Pioneer movement seems to be sinking ever deeper into financial difficulties, but Arthur's Day (which celebrates Arthur Guinness's birthday on September 24th) is being promoted as a commercial rival to St Patrick's Day and is marked by drunken revelry.
The Queen will visit Croke Park, headquarters of the GAA, but also deeply associated with the assault by British troops in 1920 on the
5,000 supporters attending the Dublin-Tipperary match. Among the 15 innocent killed were Michael Hogan, the 28-year-old Tipperary full back, and a small child. The Hogan stand is named after the player.
The attack was carried out in retaliation for one made on British intelligence operatives in Dublin.
Michael Collins had been trying to strike a decisive blow against British intelligence officers in the city but popular ordinary Irish Catholic officers were targeted too.
The army in Dublin was infuriated by what was seen as a cowardly attack on men in their pyjamas. They were out for revenge.
It was decided to launch a search at Croke Park as it was suspected that the assailants had entered the city under the guise of football supporters. Soldiers were instructed to shoot anyone who refused to be searched for weapons.
In the official version, the officer who was supposed to explain the nature of the operation by megaphone was late and when the soldiers arrived they immediately came under fire, which they returned.
Later, British forces claimed to have recovered more than 30 revolvers at the stadium. The Irish Times reported an exchange of fire the following day but the balance of subsequent reporting in the newspaper, which included evidence from former British soldiers, suggested that there was no firing from the crowd.
These are unhappy memories, to say the least, and it is a sign of the confidence of the two states that they feel it is right now for the Queen to visit Croke Park. The British monarch will also lay a wreath at the National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge, a site dedicated to the 49,400 Irish soldiers who lost their lives in the first World War.
It is hard not to recall the moment on St Patrick's Day 1916 when John Redmond, the democratically elected leader of Irish nationalism, went with George V and the royal family, along with Lords Kitchener and French, to visit the reserve battalion of the Irish Guards stationed in East Anglia.
The men were all presented with a sprig of shamrock by the king and there was much talk of Irish heroes such as Michael O'Leary VC. Within a few short weeks, Redmond's leadership was to be swept away by the republican insurrectionaries who launched the Easter Rising.
Most Irish people seem to be relaxed about this visit but, for a significant minority, it will be a disconcerting experience. This goes beyond questions of a national revolution, which has reached its culmination. It is more to do with the profound concern at the current direction of Irish society at a vulnerable moment. The "gallant allies in Europe" hailed by the men of 1916 no longer appear quite so gallant.
Few can find it in their hearts to accept as a true bill the list of charges a republican splinter group presented in their recent mock trial and execution of Queen Elizabeth, including the eradication of the Irish language.
Beneath all the ceremonial joys or diplomatic language of reconciliation, the Queen's visit dramatises a certain unease. The lurking fear lies in the idea that if a final compromise with Britain is reached that Irish history will retrospectively become meaningless. Such fears have a long history; in 1915, lamenting the widespread popular endorsement received for John Redmond's support for the British war effort, the Irish Irelander, Arthur Clery, lamented that Anglicisation would rapidly lead to secularisation and "the men who knelt around the penal altars will be forgotten".
WB Yeats, trying to rally the Blueshirts, declared that if they failed to achieve the heroic ideal underlying nationalism "history turns into rubbish/ All that great past to a trouble of fools."
Paul Bew is professor of politics at Queen's University Belfast and sits
as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and is chairman of the
British-Irish Association