Speech befitting a future king - Royal visit

FOLLOWING the visible firmness of the handshake between Britain’s Prince Charles and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, the visit of the Prince and his wife Camilla to Ireland has been transformed into an occasion of peace and reconciliation. The atmosphere was laden with symbolism when the royal couple visited the seaside village of Mullaghmore where Lord Louis Mountbatten, his great-uncle, mentor and the man he described as the “grandfather I never had”, was callously murdered along with three other people when they set out on a fishing trip in their small boat on a fine August morning in 1979, only to be blown up by a Provisional IRA bomb.

The tragedy was all the more poignant as the Mountbattens had established close relations with the local people and the peer barred gardaí on security duty from travelling with them in the boat. This left them looking on helplessly from the cliff top when it was blown up.