Now is not the time for royal visit

SO the seemingly endless speculation and conditioning on a visit to the Republic of Ireland by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II has come to pass.

President McAleese, with agreement of the government, has formally issued the British monarch and her husband Prince Phillip with an invitation to visit. This will be the first official visit by a reigning monarch to the Republic of Ireland since Irish Independence in 1922 and is being portrayed as part of a normalisation process between two friendly neighbouring states.

However, I am of the view that it is a further step to restore a formalised British dimension to the Irish State and perhaps even the start of preliminary talks on rejoining the Commonwealth. It is, I believe, part of a broader long-term strategy of cultural re-incorporation of this state into the British sphere of influence. We already have a situation whereby the British monarch bestows titles of nobility and honours on Irish citizens as if they were her own subjects, which I regard as an unwelcome intrusion into the republican ethos upon which this state was built. It seems the old political imperialism is being replaced by a new cultural imperialism.