A royal visit filled with WTF moments
An opportunity to have the safe royal couple sing ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’ was sadly missed, writes Donal Lynch
THE freezing hours on the pavement were Kate’s revenge. “Waity Katie” the press dubbed her during her seemingly endless courtship with William, when she appeared to be lingering on his arm in the hope of a ring.
Now, one royal wedding and three children later, we were the ones who were waiting. Never can so many have hung on so long for so little: local press cast pitying glances on the poor BBC correspondent who had to breathlessly report on the Windsors’s blink-and-you’ll-miss it appearance in a Temple Bar lane or their brief advent on the cobblestones outside the Guinness Storehouse, but we were all subsisting on crumbs of Kate.
And yet we hungrily devoured these. As the royals moved in front of us we picked their bones clean with our ravenous gaze.
How improbably tall they were; Michael D seemed to rise barely to Kate’s hip.
And how skinny; William looked like a long drink of water — it was hard to remember a time when we thought he was the handsome prince of the family.
Kate’s waist is the size of a human wrist. The English writer Hilary Mantel once described her as “a doll on whom certain rags are hung” but how they hang.
With her green J Lo knockoff, her Riess coat, her obligatory nod to some Irish designers, and her model-like carriage, it was almost possible to forgive her for not being
or Meghan.
As she disembarked the Aer Lingus plane, an air stewardess looked at her as much as to say “you’re wearing the old uniform, love”.
The itinerary was full of WTF moments. Garden of Remembrance, Aras and a tedious sip of Guinness you expected, along with a few nods to good causes.
But what diplomatic rush of blood to the head saw William making soup in a Londis in Kildare (if they wanted to make it properly Irish surely they should have been serving breakfast rolls in Centra) or Kate mingling in Accessorise, beloved of shoplifting schoolgirls?
We disgraced ourselves again, naturally. As the royal couple left the Aras, the press immediately hurried after them, leaving poor Michael D and Sabrina waving sadly in the doorway behind us.
This, security sternly informed us, was a breach of protocol, never mind an affront to common civility. We should have remained in place until the president went back inside.
But we are common, we thought, as we stood there, chastened, our eyes already drifting in the direction of the royal Land Rover; we were eager to see how the Cambridges were received by Matt and Leo, on their last big day out.
And surely, after a hundred odd years of Independence, it was finally safe to acknowledge that we have an addiction to the royals. We can’t help ourselves.
A story spread around the press pool of a woman waiting outside who was hoping to talk to William.
Charles had signed a card — a mock-up of a Hello! magazine cover — for her late mother. As everyone else fired off close-range pictures of William and Kate to their own mothers, we realised we were all that woman.
Before the Kardashians and Love Island, our national celebrity obsession was the royals and Hello! magazine was our font of gossip. Throughout the 1980s stacks of the magazine sat in houses up and down the country. They were as de rigueur in Irish country kitchens as the Sacred Heart.
Back then the world was obsessed with pandas, their imminent extinction and their unsurpassed cuddliness. Now, a generation later, the royals seem like our modern pandas. They exist only in captivity, observed through a screen.
We are fascinated with their breeding habits and we coo over their cuteness. And like the pandas they are slightly tragic figures. Watching William take a slug of Guinness, or make soup — which inexplicably ended up on the royal itinerary — it was hard not to feel just a little sorry for him. His duty is a lifetime of prosaic observances, tourist box-ticking and painful small talk.
Protest was mostly unseen but there was naturally a faction that were unimpressed with the royal fanfare.
A team of guards — all of whom were armed — kept troublemakers far away from Wills and Kate, but Virgin Media’s Zara King dealt with a group of teenagers who shouted “f **k the queen” while she was live on air and, as reporters breathlessly recorded the hundreds who turned out to welcome the Cambridges in Galway city centre, another social media wag noted: “Not pictured: the hundreds who stayed home to watch Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada (2006).”
Sabina Higgins made what was seen as a reference to a year of tumult in Kensington Palace, reportedly remarking to William and Kate: “You’ve had a lot of exciting things happen in your family.”
But in truth she was only acknowledging the elephant in the room. The Windsors have had a lot going on. Two factions of royals have recently emerged. You have the controversial ones — Prince Andrew, Meghan and Harry, Prince Philip — and the safe pairs of hands: Queen ElizDiana abeth herself, Charles and Camilla — and, very definitely, William and Kate.
Every aspect of this royal visit was orchestrated to preserve their perfect blandness. The one time William made a remotely humorous observation — joking that the couple were here to spread the coronavirus — it prompted screeching headlines about “poor taste” in the UK papers.
The most pointed it got during the rest of the trip was Kate and William spotting all the Guinness on the table of a pub in Galway and asking if those present always had a drink that early. One almost pined for a few impolitic Prince Philip barbs about pandering Paddys.
In the end the trip was, according to the security forces who covered it, not nearly as big as the queen’s visit in 2011 or even Harry and Meghan in 2018.
The Cambridges seemed first and foremost to be celebrities, a showbiz rather than a political beat for reporters.
And yet the royals aren’t just state-sponsored Kardashians, they do have a real diplomatic function. When the queen danced with the Ghanian president in 1961, it won the country as an ally for the West at the height of the Cold War — a moment memorialised in The Crown.
Simon Coveney told William and Kate that “together, we bear a responsibility to continue to redesign and shape the Irish-British relationship”, and we all knew what he meant.
After a few years of Brexit related identity crisis for the Brits, Kate and William trying their hand at hurling on a trip to Salthill seemed to cancel out a certain amount of Priti Patel, although an opportunity to have Wills and Kate belt out a verse of Come Out Ye Black and Tans was sadly missed.
Next time.
‘A generation later the royals are modern pandas. We are fascinated with their breeding habits and coo over their cuteness’