Fawning attitude to monarchy

YOUR columnist Matt Cooper (April 15), commenting on the imminent arrival of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland, displays an abject servility towards British royalty not seen since former Taoiseach John Bruton grovellingly referred to his meeting with Prince Charles in 1995 as ‘the happiest day of my life’.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Mr Cooper was acting as Ireland’s indigenous public relations officer for the British royal family and not a columnist for a leading national Irish newspaper. Such a fawning attitude towards British monarchy is not alone embarrassing but repugnant to the republican ethos of this state.

Displaying a condescension which I have rarely witnessed, Matt Cooper urges us to behave “like good neighbours who can put aside rows from the past”. To refer to the imperial colonisation of this country and the horrors that followed in the form of the Penal Laws, subjugation, slaughter, famine, plantation and forced transportation, as ‘rows from the past’ is an affront to those who suffered appalling abuses from our former colonial masters.

Matt Cooper bizarrely refers to Queen Elizabeth as “the chosen representative of the British people” who “has a popular and proper mandate”. In fact, the British monarch is an unelected head of state for life, inherited this privilege at birth and will pass it on to her successor. The monarch is also the unelected Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Only Protestant heirs may take the British throne. Neither Catholics, nor those who marry a Catholic, nor those born out of wedlock, may remain in the line of succession. Sons also take precedence over daughters and the right of succession belongs to the eldest son, therefore institutionalising not just religious discrimination but male primogeniture. To copperfasten this anachronism, elected members of the House of Commons are barred from debating the role of the monarchy.

Under the British ‘constitution’, the Sovereign ‘personifies the state’, is an integral part of the legislature, head of the executive and judiciary and commander-in-chief of all armed forces of the Crown. The unelected and unaccountable monarch has the power to dismiss parliament, appoint prime ministers, bishops and governors, and can confer honours and peerages on selected subjects. Indeed, many ‘squireens’ in this country have been the recipients of these baubles which apparently are much prized by the Uriah Heeps and lickspittles.

Surely any society which accepts the principle that some are born to rule while others are born to be ruled is just one step away from accepting that some states are destined to rule while other states are destined to be ruled. It was this philosophical mindset which gave birth to the British Empire and all the horrors and oppression that it entailed.

Tom Cooper

Knocklyon, Dublin 16