Sir, – Further to your recent "Neighbours – Britain and Ireland" series of articles on the relationship between Britain and Ireland, it is now a commonplace observation that British- Irish relations have never been better. At the same time, all is not yet sweetness and light. Certain tensions persist, arising from the historical hangover, unequal strengths, disparate economies, different worldviews, and cultural and temperamental divergences. Some of us suspect that the British, even our Hibernophile friends among them, have a lingering post-imperial tendency to be patronising. A century ago, a London lady who married into the Irish landed gentry (a descendant of hers told me this story) was never happy in this country because she "never quite saw the point of Ireland really".
When I attended my first annual British-Irish Association (BIA) meeting, I reverted to type, behaving with the exaggerated prickly sensitivity of the scarred ex-colonial! But I soon came to value the fresh contacts and the new friends, including the late Sir David Goodall, a chief architect of the Anglo-Irish agreement.
Though some suspicious Irish nationalists might snidely refer to the BIA (entirely without foundation) as "a listening point for British intelligence", it remains a valuable forum of friendly interchange and will surely continue to flourish, even if happily its original raison d'être (ie Northern Ireland-related issues) was no longer to exist.
The ” Britain and me ” dimension, though sounding pretentious, took on an exciting personal turn in 2011 when Queen Elizabeth came to University College Cork in the course of her Irish visit. It was arranged that she should view the statue of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and that I should explain the historical background to her. (My presentation was the final item in Queen Elizabeth’s programme, before her departure for Cork airport and her flight back home, so that I can boast to this day that I had the last word on the queen’s visit!).
In my mini-lecture, I told her how her ancestor’s statue had stood on the highest gable of the new Queen’s College (now UCC) from 1849 until its removal in the nationalist Ireland of 1934 and its replacement by St Finbarr, Cork’s patron saint. Meanwhile, the discredited statue underwent a bizarre process of storage and burial until 1995, when it was exhumed and put on display for UCC’s sesquicentennial exhibition.
It was a unique experience for an Irish historian to point out the symbolism of this sequence to the visiting British monarch. The chequered fortunes of the statue reflected the profound changes in British- Irish relations over that long period – first, British dominance, then nationalist triumphalism, finally reconciliation. The Victoria statue had now come to represent the mutual respect of friendly neighbours on equal terms. And Queen Elizabeth’s visit happily rounded off all that symbolism.
I was brought back to earth when my family tartly reminded me that I was once the nationalist prig who didn’t want any British royal family magazines near the house! And now what an irony! Indeed at a personal level, the event could not have been a farther cry from the Anglophobic nationalism of my boyhood. – Yours, etc,
JOHN A MURPHY,
Emeritus Professor
of History,
University College Cork.