A year of change tinged with loss

WERE it not for the visits of Queen Elizabeth II and US President Barack Obama to Ireland, 2011 would have been the bleakest of years, blighted by unemployment, mass emigration, harsh austerity measures, another hairshirt budget and a deep sense of crisis across the eurozone.

Both at home and abroad, it has been a time of chaos and turbulence. The Arab Spring saw an end to Muammar Gaddafi’s tyrannical dictatorship in Libya. And after endless clerical sex abuse scandals, the Government took the unprecedented step of closing the Irish embassy at the Vatican following Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s lambasting of Rome’s mishandling of a tragic scenario.

There was a welcome ray of sunshine when the Queen and then-president Mary McAleese appeared side by side at Áras an Uachtaráin. It was a deeply psychological and symbolic moment, an acknowledgment by the British head of state that she was in Ireland as a visitor, a guest of the Irish head of state, a meeting of equals.