Quiet dignity of crowds exposes the Irish elite

Amazement at Queen’s ability to speak four words of Irish revealed the truly colonial attitude of our leaders

THE QUEEN looked out of her Range Rover and waved. And all our hands went up, a couple of dozen of them, in a forest of waving. We were so far away we didn’t think she’d see us. We were delighted.

A little pulse ran through our small crowd. It was the love that dare not speak its name, but will turn up in its anorak on a chilly May morning. Walking to Islandbridge from Inchicore was a pretty woman in her sixties, a very Dublin woman, who said her father used to bring her to Islandbridge every November. He was in the RAF during the war.

The lady bought a poppy every year, she said. The third member of our party on the short walk was a man who had come in from Clondalkin on the bus and was amazed that the bus had been allowed into the city centre at all.

We were a humble lot, and tolerant. A man with a South African accent, in a high-viz vest and baseball cap, directed us firmly behind the barriers. “I’ll just search your bag for bombs,” said a Garda sergeant.

Our crowd was tiny. Mothers with prams, grey-haired ladies in anoraks, a couple of office workers, retired men. Opposite, a similar lot were standing behind barriers on the same side of the streets as the side entrance to the War Memorial Gardens. We were outnumbered by gardaí by about 12 to one. Afterwards, some gardaí were loaded on to a double decker bus and, as it pulled away, the ladies by the entrance gave the bus their royal wave. The guards laughed.

An Irish crowd is a witty one and it is very sad that, in Dublin at least, the crowd was swept from the pavements for the duration of the royal visit. Luckily the Queen eventually managed to meet an Irish crowd in Cork. It has to be acknowledged that an effort was made by organisers to make sure ordinary people met the Queen at the various venues. And that the gardaí were both informal and extremely strict. But the truth is that even the guards felt the emptiness of the streets in the end. The comedian Maeve Higgins had the best story of the royal visit when she told John Murray of how her sister was jogging in the Phoenix Park with two friends and the guards had asked them to wave at the Queen as she drove by, because there was nobody else there to do it.

“You can’t walk down the middle of the road,” a garda said, even though there was no traffic allowed on the road back to Inchicore and the Queen had left Islandbridge at this stage.

I just wanted to look over the wall and see what the gardens looked like, now that the Queen was gone and there wasn’t a heavily armed soldier every 20 yards behind the railings. But no.

It is a cliche now to say, as a poet once did, that the Queen must think that the world smells of fresh paint. But one has to wonder what the Queen thinks of daily life in Ireland. Here is a sentence from the I rish Post's online report of the Croke Park visit: "They were whisked inside to one of the premium-level suites where Irish set dancers tapped out a traditional routine." Which is all very well, but how many set dancers do you actually know?

The visit of Eilís A Dó has raised several interesting questions, but above all it demonstrated a central truth: official Ireland is fascinated with itself and never tires of hearing its own fragile story.

The Queen is a professional and, as well as taking all steps at a gallop and thereby raising the stakes for everyone over 70, she is practised at appearing to enjoy herself. It is her job.

The trick is to take this for granted, as most Irish people did. Not to nearly fall out of your standing when she managed to speak four words of a language that is foreign not only to her, but to most people outside official Ireland.

The Queen is used to speaking four words of a foreign language, as a workaday courtesy, when addressing gatherings which include previous prime ministers and senior civil servants – in other words the elite of whichever country she is in.

It is sad that our leaders are so astonished to see their pretensions taken seriously. Their gratitude for it was truly colonial.

It would be too much to say that the Irish are, even since the ending of British rule here, lions led by donkeys. But the Irish crowd, made up of ordinary people, has always been streets ahead of its leaders in its sophistication and, above all, in its confidence.

People in the Cork crowd were secure enough to wave Union Jacks for an honoured guest. It was the people at the banquets who needed reassurance: they have always been more dangerous to Ireland than its crowds.