All eyes on milestone IRA meeting with prince
GALWAY: Britain’s Prince Charles met Gerry Adams in Ireland yesterday, in his first meeting with the leader of the former political wing of the Irish Republican Army which killed his great uncle in a bomb attack 36 years ago.
The private meeting, the latest in a series of gestures of reconciliation between Britain and Sinn Fein, took place in the Irish city of Galway, a day before Charles was due to visit the nearby site where the IRA murdered Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1979.
This was
the
first
time Adams had met a senior member of the royal family.
Three others, including a 14year-old boy who was Charles’s godson, were also killed when the IRA blew up a boat Mountbatten, who was a senior British military commander in World War II, was using during a holiday in the region.
Charles has long been a hated figure among Irish nationalists because of his position as head of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment, owing to its role in the Bloody Sunday shootings in 1972 in which 13 Roman Catholic civil rights marchers were killed.
Adams said the visit was an opportunity to promote reconciliation and that, while the Parachute Regiment had killed many Irish citizens, Charles “has also been bereaved by the actions of republicans”.
“Thankfully the conflict is over. But there remains unresolved injustices. These must be rectified and a healing process developed,” Adams said.
In 2012, Charles’s mother, Queen Elizabeth, met Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander and senior member of Sinn Fein. The meeting was seen as a landmark step in rapprochement in Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland has been largely peaceful since a 1998 power-sharing deal ended three decades of violence between Protestants, who want to remain loyal to the British crown, and Catholics, who favour unification with Ireland.
The IRA ended its 30-year armed campaign against British rule in 1998, but small splinter groups have continued to launch attacks against British targets. Security for the visit has been tight. – Reuters