Had President Michael D Higgins not delivered such a public rejection of it, the religious service held in Armagh on Thursday to mark the centenary of Northern Ireland's establishment would likely have drawn little attention. Instead, every last detail of the event came under close scrutiny, and it was to the credit of the four churches that it passed smoothly in a spirit of mutual respect.
Of the invitees, only Higgins and Sinn Féin appear to have declined to attend. The symbolism of the president's absence was less conspicuous owing to the late cancellation of her own travel plans, on medical advice, of Queen Elizabeth. But the mishandling of the episode – more so than the decision to decline the invitation in itself, which was the president's prerogative – will reverberate for some time. The failure to communicate Higgins's apparently long-held concerns about the title of the event to the organisers is one that remains unexplained. Higgins's own rationale for his decision, provided at a media appearance in Rome, was a little unclear (and contained an erroneous claim, later withdrawn, that the organisers had addressed him using an incorrect title).
The controversy, coming so late in the decade of centenaries, is a reminder of how the sensitive anniversaries of recent years have in general been handled with skill and tact. Programmes of events North and South could, if handled badly, have inflamed opinion and become vehicles for the enactment of more contemporary battles. Instead, underpinned by the advice of historians and an insistence above all on remembering, as opposed to celebrating, that defining period in Irish history has been marked with a rigour that reflects its rich complexity. Any temptation to view the period through the prism of modern political contests, and even to bind it to present-day work on reconciliation or inclusion, have in general been resisted. With the exception of a Government-made video on 1916 that omitted any reference to the leaders of the Rising but found space for present-day celebrities, and the backlash that greeted plans last year to hold an event to commemorate the Royal Irish Constabulary, it has been a serious and well-judged process.
The debacle over Higgins's non-attendance may have required some diplomatic repair work – and the attendance of two Government members in Armagh will have helped in that effort – but it is not the cause of the deterioration in relations between Dublin and the unionist parties. The root problem is Brexit, coinciding as it has with internal competition for supremacy within unionism itself. And while a resolution to the impasse over the Northern Ireland protocol would help to defuse those tensions, the destabilising effect of the rupture between the EU and the UK will make the important work of reconciliation and co-operation even more difficult than before.