Madam, – It’s interesting how people from the same place can live in completely different realities.
As a University of Ulster graduate myself, Joe McLaughlin’s letter (June 30th) about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to that University in 1977 reminded me of my own very different reality at the time. I was a teenager in August 1977 and like many others from my community, I spent the duration of that visit being beaten up and down a cell in Castlereagh Interrogation Centre in Belfast. Every now and again my torturers would taunt me with triumphalist stories about the queen’s visit – before getting back to their business!
After several days, when she had returned home, I was unceremoniously thrown out. My story is not particularly special. It’s there to illustrate that I have no fond, quaint memories of the 1977 queen’s visit to my part of Ireland. In 1977, the people of my community in Belfast had by and large no time for Queen Elizabeth or what she represented. I suspect they still don’t.
As social scientists we try to understand the complexity of the relationships between different communities and power. Maybe this should be at least one consideration in the stampede to celebrate Queen Elizabeth and what she represents.
In the process we might then finally be able to develop a mature relationship with our nearest neighbour – one based on equality, fraternity and liberty, the principles that underpin the Republic to which countless generations have aspired. – Yours, etc,