OPINION: Thanks Queen Elizabeth, you were a remarkable human being

WE have come a very long way in 100 years. Not so very long ago it is doubtful whether the death of Queen Elizabeth II would have inspired such an outpouring of respect, even affection, in this Republic of ours.

It was right and appropriate that our President, past Presidents, Taoiseach, and other senior politicians should speak warmly of her and that the Tricolour at Leinster House and embassies overseas should have been at half mast.

Elizabeth was a remarkable human being who gave extraordinary service to her people and country for over seven decades, almost right to the moment of death. Her meeting with Boris Johnson and new British Prime Minister Liz Truss was her last public appearance, two days before she died. And, clearly, she looked very frail in photographs of that event.

Here in Ireland, she made a hugely positive impression during her State visit in 2011 but also on her many visits to Northern Ireland where she helped the peace process greatly by shaking hands with Martin McGuinness.

Yes, she deserved such respectful response to her death. Of course there were the inevitable yobos who did what yobos do on hearing she had died, but these were comparatively few and far between.

Reflecting on Ireland’s long and difficult relationship with the monarchy next door it is easy to be taken aback by the Irish response last week to the death of Queen Elizabeth.

It is sometimes forgotten that the issue which provoked our bitter civil war 100 years ago was the oath of allegiance to King George V, her grandfather. Most people assume that it was the prospect of partition that caused the civil war. It was not.

Here is Eamon de Valera in the tense Treaty debates of December 1921 on the subject.

“You will swear allegiance to that Constitution and to that King; and if the representatives of the Republic should ask the people of Ireland to do that which is inconsistent with the Republic, I say they are subverting the Republic. It would be a surrender which was never heard of in Ireland since the days of Henry II.; and are we in this generation, which has made Irishmen famous throughout the world, to sign our names to the most ignoble document that could be signed.”

The Treaty “acknowledges the head of the British Empire, not merely as the head of an association, but as the direct monarch of Ireland, as the source of executive authority in Ireland,” he said.

As the debates continued in January 1922 Harry Boland said his chief objection to the Treaty was “because I am asked to surrender the title of Irishman and accept the title of West Briton. I object because this Treaty denies the sovereignty of the Irish nation, and I stand by the principles I have always held— that the Irish people are by right a free people.”

It was his view that “having failed to force British sovereignty on the Irish nation for 750 years, she has done it now by diplomacy. If any member of the opposite side can convince me that that is not an oath of allegiance— to swear that oath and 'that I will be faithful to His Majesty King George V., his heirs and successors by law, in virtue of the common citizenship.”

Harry Boland was himself killed in the civil war fighting against the new Free State’s forces.

De Valera’s reference to Henry II was to the first King of England to invade Ireland (in 1171) having been authorized to do so in 1155 by Pope Adrian IV, the only English Pope in history. His papal bull 'Laudabiliter' gave Henry permission to invade Ireland “for the correction of morals and the introduction of virtues, for the advancement of the Christian religion.

Henry arrived in Cork with 400 ships and, for the first time, a king of England set foot on Irish soil. He stayed six months and changed the course of Irish history.

In 1541 Henry VIII forced the then Irish Parliament to proclaim him King of Ireland and had passed the Crown of Ireland Act under which whoever became sovereign was also King/Queen of Ireland.

With him, of course, religion also entered the equation when he broke from Rome and Ireland remained stubbornly loyal to the Pope. Attempts by the Crown, under him and his daughter Elizabeth I, to force Protestantism on Ireland failed but cost thousands of Irish lives.

Defeat of the Irish at Kinsale in 1602 by Crown forces led to the Flight of the Earls and confiscation of their estates which, in Ulster particularly, were then planted by mainly Presbyterian settlers from Scotland with the native Irish forced into the bogs and the hills.

Then in England you had the rise of the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell, who decapitated Charles I and crushed the Irish in a bloody campaign. It is hardly necessary to repeat here Cromwell’s legacy to Ireland but it was one instance where the English monarchy played no part.

With the accession of Charles II to the throne across the water, it was hoped relations between these two island would improve greatly. It was a relaxed period up to his death in 1685, when his brother James succeeded but he ended up losing to William at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the consequences of which we still live with.

The more immediate consequences was enforcement of a series of penal laws intended to reduce the Catholic Irish to penury.

As the great Irish-born English parliamentarian Edmund Burke said of them, they were “a machine of wise and deliberate contrivance as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”

The rebellion of 1798 was viciously suppressed as was the lesser rising of 1803 so that by 1821 it was deemed safe for King George IV to visit Ireland, the first British monarch to arrive here since William in 1690. The trip was deemed a great success but he was still reluctant in 1829 to allow Catholic Emancipation.

In her long reign Victoria visited Ireland four times. Remarkably she visited in 1849 as the country recovered from the ravages of Famine few signs of which she was to see. Her own record during those fraught years would deepen bitter animosity on this island towards the monarchy.

She was accused of not only failing to ease the misery of the Irish people but stood accused of preventing others from outshining her meagre attempts to help, preventing a significant amount of money from making its way to Ireland from Turkey, for instance.

It was claimed the Sultan of Turkey offered to give £10,000 towards relief in Ireland but that the British embassy in Constantinople went to his people to say that it would offend royal protocol, so he reduced his donation. Victoria had donated £2,000.

Such stories would in later years fuel huge support among the Irish in America, particularly, for physical force republicanism in Ireland, something that continued through the more recent Troubles.

Victoria’s 1900 visit was the last to what is now the Republic of Ireland before Queen Elizabeth’s in 2011, the first by a reigning British monarch to this state. Its significance can’t be exaggerated, any more than can the impact of her bow in the Garden of Remembrance, her cupla focal in Dublin Castle, and her words that “with the benefit of historical hindsight, we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.”

The following year she shook hands with the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and former leader of the IRA, Martin McGuinness. Thank you Elizabeth II. RIP.