Controversy surrounded a 1968 previous visit to Ireland by the Belgian royal family. Garda action against student demonstrators in Trinity College and subsequent inflammatory press reports led to a series of demonstrations through Dublin, a TCD inquiry, and questions in the Dáil.
The visit of King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola, like the current visit, was set against the background of a political crisis back home. But it was the source of public interest and, broadly welcome. It was judged a "great success" by The Irish Times as "as we were brought face to face with royalty for the first time in more than half a century".
The royal couple's visit to Trinity was met, however, by a dozen jeering Maoist demonstrators carrying a banner accusing Belgium of responsibility for the killing in 1962 of independent Congo's first prime minister, a popular anti-colonial figure, Patrice Lumumba.
Gardaí attempted to seize the banner and scuffles ensued, encouraged by a raucous group of supporters of the college's unionist society, the 1964 Committee. Order was restored largely through the intervention of Senator WB Stanford, Professor of Classics, but the occasion was written up by the Evening Herald in terms of hundreds of students rioting. The president of the Students Representative Council, Alan Matthews, now Professor of Economics, denounced "the unprovoked attack on peaceful demonstrators". Students marched in their hundreds to the offices of the Herald where they burned copies of the paper. The latter retaliated a few days later with the unprecedented publication on its front page of a supportive editorial from Trinity News.
The Irish Times summed up the visit editorially: "As against the general welcome, the one rumpus was negligible. The visit was not only festive: it brought benefits to both countries. Big coverage . . . will serve as a reminder to one of the members of the EEC, and indirectly to the other five, not only of our political existence but of our individuality . . . The message that Ireland belongs in Europe, and is not a lone island in the Atlantic, will have been taken."
In February 2002, the Belgian government admitted to a "moral responsibility" and "an irrefutable portion of responsibility in the events that led to the death of Lumumba."
