Irish Examiner view: Windsors could teach Castros a lesson on attaining and keeping power

Royal family ironically show that change saves convention

Raul Castro, first secretary of the Communist Party and former president, attends the VIII Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba's opening session, at the Convention Palace in Havana, Cuba, where he announced his retirement. Picture: Ariel Ley Royero/ACN via AP

Britain reminded the world again this weekend that it has a thorough understanding of the potency of public ceremony. The Windsor funeral of Prince Philip, though greatly constrained, showed a commitment to formality and tradition that few cultures celebrate so vigorously much less try to replicate.

Whether a majority in the increasingly polarised United Kingdom — 52/48 — was moved by those events is an open question. That almost 110,000 people complained to the BBC before the funeral over its blanket coverage of the duke's death shows that even the oldest assumptions can endure for only so long. How long those assumptions might survive should Scotland or Northern Ireland change their status is a pressing, open question. These shifts underline one of the only certainties of our world — change is constant and largely unstoppable.