Royal visit unites Enniskillen community
She made the short walk across the street from the Anglican St Macartin’s Cathedral’s deanery where she privately met seven survivors of the Enniskillen bombing, to the St Michael’s, filled with local community groups that had gathered to meet her.
The Queen, on a two-day tour, is making her 20th visit to the North since first arriving on its shores in 1953.
Representatives from schools, sports clubs and organisations from both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds stood among impressive flower displays and briefly chatted to the royal couple during their 30-minute stay.
The Dean of St Macartin’s, Rev Kenny Hall, and parish priest of St Michael’s, Canon Peter O’Reilly, who had planned the day, were congratulated by well-wishers.
“We really are one community,” said the dean.
Canon O’Reilly highlighted an extract from a hymn sang at the service: “There was a line in it at the end, ‘past put behind us’.
“That, for me, was a profound moment.”
It is nearly 25 years since an IRA bomb was detonated in the county town as families gathered to honour the war dead at the town’s cenotaph. The Remembrance Day massacre claimed 11 lives that day in 1987.
But yesterday was a happy occasion, a morning to celebrate. “Long live the Queen,” giggled flag-waving children at the corner of the aptly-named Darling St.
Crowds had turned the town’s main thoroughfare into a blur of red, white and blue. But the rain pelted down and news came in that the monarch’s flight was diverted by the weather.
Then the Queen arrived, just as the rain clouds left.
She walked into St Macartin’s where the congregation and clergy from across the religious divide were waiting.
Today, a historic handshake will take place between the Queen and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness.
