Oh dear. It was all meant to be going so well for British-Irish relations. Earlier this month both the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the Republic’s president, Michael D. Higgins, flew out to London for King Charles’s coronation — the first Irish nationalist leaders to attend a British coronation in over a century. Even Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s first minister, managed to swallow her pride and make the visit, saying “I am an Irish republican. I also recognize there are many people on our island for whom the coronation is a hugely important occasion.”
It appears that some did not treat the ceremony with quite the same respect though. For also attending the event was Leo Varadkar’s boyfriend Matt Barrett, who went on to post several ribald messages to a private Instagram group during the coronation, which — rather embarrassingly for Varadkar — have now leaked to the Irish Times. …
Barrett is well within his rights to mock the coronation, of course. But it does raise one pertinent question: if he thought it was so stupid, why attend the ceremony at all?
[I can tell you that this question got asked in a very pointed manner in Irish-language media. It was seen as a sell-out to the monarchical establishment that enslaved and oppressed the Irish for centuries because, well … that’s exactly what it was. It may have been necessitated by diplomatic priorities, but especially after Brexit, the Irish are demanding to know what those priorities actually are. — Ed]
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