Prince of Wales to visit UN humanitarian training camp in Kildare

The Prince of Wales will mark Ireland's involvement in humanitarian peace missions around the world when he visits a training centre later.

Charles will tour the United Nations Training School Ireland at the Curragh Camp in Kildare as part of his third visit in as many years.

The facility uses knowledge gathered from 50 years of peacekeeping to prepare for deployments overseas.

Ireland has a history of intervention in places like Lebanon during bloody conflict.

The Prince and the Duchess of Cornwall are also expected to travel to Kilkenny.

At Kilkenny Castle they will hear traditional music and watch a GAA hurling match.

Camilla will visit the Irish National Stud horse-breeding facility.

The visit is part of a four-day trip to the North and the Republic.

On Wednesday the royal couple met President Michael D Higgins and his wife after visiting a police memorial in Belfast.

On Tuesday they travelled to the HomePlace visitor centre dedicated to the late Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney.

The Prince urged a spirit of reconciliation during a dinner at the president's house.

He said: "What I have discovered during my many visits on both sides of the border is what lies at the core of reconciliation... which is the process of enabling communities that have been divided and have injured each other to reach out across the divide to build a strong and sustainable relationship based upon a sense of the common good.

"By the very nature of that process, no such relationship is possible if any one community sits in isolation from the rest. But it is also only possible if each community is first of all confident of its own heritage and of its own identity.

"Only then, with compassion and humility, can it seek to define itself alongside those who have another identity, recognising that the other is equally valid.

"I would suggest that, in recent years, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom have achieved this in such a dramatic way that our joint efforts have become a beacon for the rest of the world - an example of how to build a peace and create an enduring and mutually productive relationship between close neighbours.

"I have no doubt, despite current challenges, that our relationship will continue to endure and prosper, and it will do so in no small way because of the natural generosity of spirit that exists here and the integrity of the culture of Ireland which you, Mr. President, amongst many others, have so ably nurtured and protected."