Ali Moore, Presenter: The Queen has arrived in Ireland on the first state visit by a ruling British monarch since Ireland became a Republic in 1922. Relations between Ireland and Britain remain strained and, even before the Queen landed in Dublin, police were called to detonate a bomb planted on a bus outside the city. The incident followed terror threats in London in the lead up to this historic trip.Rico says it's comparable to the Queen coming to Washington to apologize for that little misunderstanding back in the late 1700s...
European correspondent Emma Alberici reports.
(Army officer shouts orders as Queen alights from a plane)
Emma Alberici: Eight hundred years after the first English king came to Ireland as an invader, and one hundred years after the last visit by a reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth is here to take her place, not as a ruler, but for a meeting of two heads of state coming together as equals.
(Protestors shout slogans)
There have been protests from extreme Republicans who see this visit as premature and insensitive.
Voiceover: I don't think she should have come over. There's too much soreness here. I mean, she still has six counties that she won't give back to us.
Voiceover: Maybe if British affairs were taken out of Northern Ireland, I think that would really help.
Voiceover: I don't think the history is gone, to be honest. I'd like to think we're mature enough to be big about this. I just hope we're grown-ups about it, you know?
Voiceover: We are very aware of our history. I think much more so than the English. Um, but that's probably because we were on the other side of it.
Emma Alberici: But the Queen has come to Ireland to bury the past. She'll lay a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance, where the statue that symbolises the struggle against the crown will watch over her, a reminder of how her grandfather, King George the Fifth, so brutally suppressed those who fought for independence.
She'll confront the Troubles head on when she comes here, too. In 1920, at Croke Park Stadium (photo), British troops opened fire at a Gaelic football match, killing fourteen people.
John Major, former British prime minister: This one puts a seal on a relationship that was sour and is no longer sour. It puts a seal on the past and builds for the future.
I can't think of anything of equal significance in the last few decades.
Emma Alberici: The Good Friday agreement of 1998 made the Queen's visit possible, but no one is in any doubt about the risks. It's the biggest and most expensive security operation in the country's history, with six thousand officers and soldiers around the city on high alert around every place the Queen will visit.
Just hours before her plane was due to touch down, one bomb was found and blown up in a bus outside Dublin. Another was found to be a hoax. A bomb scare in Britain also had London in lock-down, the caller claiming to represent Irish Republican dissidents presented the first coded terror threat from Ireland in more than a decade.
Enda Kenny, Irish prime minister: We've had global figures here before, American presidents or the Pope or whoever, and security arrangements were always put in place that were appropriate to deal with that and the situation applies in the case of the visit of the Queen also.
Emma Alberici: A lot has changed in the relationship between Ireland and Britain since King George the Fifth's visit in 1911. It's hoped that his granddaughter can heal old wounds, once and for all.
17 May 2011
Trying to blow up the Queen
The ABC (no, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) has a transcript of its report about the Queen's visit to Ireland:
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