Irish summer

The British monarch,Elizabeth II,in a green dress and leprechaun hat daintily sipping a glass of Guinness through a straw would have been a most fantastic depiction anytime in her past 59-year reign. But on Wednesday a cartoon in Londons Independent came close to reality,excepting perhaps the frothy beer mug dancing in the air. For the first time in a century,ever since her grandfather,George V,crossed the Irish Sea,a reigning British monarch has set foot on Ireland. That absence of a hundred years puts into relief the bloodshed,bitter enmity and mistrust that have marked Anglo-Irish relations and cleaved the two nations all along. As a foil,her presence has been invested,not very surprising for Dublin,by a high degree of symbolism some real,some exaggerated. The real: the queens laying of the wreath at the Garden of Remembrance to honour the Irish patriots who fought against the British. The exaggerated: her green cloak to go with the Emerald Isle.

The queens visit is meant to symbolise more than anything else an acknowledgment that history should not be allowed to stand in the way of the future; that the two nations have come a long way since the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence and the many fraught years since. While Sinn Feins black balloons,the largely deserted streets and the heavy security presence reminded that history could not be too easily wished away,the queen took the first step towards a new rapprochement between the old adversaries. A year ago,British Prime Minister David Cameron had already apologised for the Bloody Sunday of 1972.

As Stephen said in Ulysses,History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. That is quite like what the British and the Irish are trying to do.