It has been almost 12 years since the now late Queen Elizabeth II visited Ireland. It was perhaps at that moment that Anglo-Irish relations looked as though they had turned – at last – a final, symbolic corner. Overnight she became an unexpected star in the Republic. Her gestures of reconciliation were roundly praised: laying a wreath in the Garden of Remembrance, and opening her speech at a State dinner in Irish, “A Úachtárain agus a chairde.”
Paul Johnston, the British ambassador to Ireland, calls Elizabeth’s 2011 visit seminal – “well judged, significant and impactful”. When she died last September Johnston recalls Simon Coveney, then minister for foreign affairs, visiting the embassy and signing the condolence book. Coveney remarked, as Johnston recollects, that the queen’s “visit meant more to Ireland and Irish people than people in Britain will ever understand”.
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Perhaps Coveney was right. But if some scores had seemed settled by 2011, the ructions caused by Brexit appeared to throw the much-improved relationship into disarray.
“I think they’ve been through a very tricky period.” Johnston says. “I think Brexit was, if you like, a structural shock to the relationship and I think, in the last couple of years that I’ve been here, the controversies over the Northern Ireland protocol and over the [British] government’s legacy legislation have made the relationship difficult.”
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Johnston, who is Scottish, thinks the Windsor Framework has pushed the British-Irish relationship into a much better place than it was in six months ago. He is quick to note a perhaps overlooked gesture by British prime minister Rishi Sunak in the early days of his tenure. When Sunak attended the British Irish Council last November, he was the first British prime minister to do so since Gordon Brown in 2007.
The Windsor Framework – in place of the Northern Ireland protocol – has been celebrated as a feat of statecraft in Europe, Dublin and London. But was there ever a sense that the British side of the negotiating table demonstrated a lack of empathy towards Ireland’s interests? Johnston doesn’t say so himself, but when asked he referred to Conservative MP and once-Brexit hardliner Steve Baker’s remarks from last year. “[Baker said] that perhaps British ministers hadn’t understood or thought about Ireland’s position as they might have done… I think there is a lot of merit in that.”
The queen’s role in the path of historical reconciliation between the two nations has been lauded by many before. But what about King Charles III? What will his reign mean for the future of the British-Irish relationship? Johnston says the king has spoken privately about how much he cares about the relationship, and moving forward: “I think he will continue to place a high emphasis on that.”
The ambassador is, unsurprisingly, a fan of the monarchy and attuned to the source of its broad appeal: “A unique connection across history, it stands above party politics, has the magic of extraordinary spectacle and the intimacy of family relations.”
Ireland, he suggests, has managed to “combine a great deal of pride in being a successful modern republic and...on part of almost everyone, I would say, a great deal of underlying affection for the United Kingdom”. Johnston, who has been based in Paris and Stockholm, and involved in UK missions to the UN, Nato and the EU. says Ireland is “a great place to live, by far my favourite posting”.
