Mary Kenny’s survey of Ireland’s relations with the British monarchy is characteristically breezy, racy and insightful, with a salty strain of anecdote.
Mary Kenny’s survey of Ireland’s relations with the British monarchy is characteristically breezy, racy and insightful, with a salty strain of anecdote. This reflects the secret affection of the Irish bourgeoisie for the royal soap opera, even when this addiction has to be concealed as carefully as a taste for alcohol in a fundamentalist Muslim state. Oddly, her account of secret suburban Catholic covens, communing with royal weddings and jubilees via television, rather trumps my memories of royalist interests among the Protestant (though emphatically not Anglo-Irish) circles of my youth. My intellectually snobbish schoolteacher mother kept a beady eye on royal doings but suspected that ‘they might be rather a stupid family’. She made an exception, oddly, for Princess Margaret, but I think that was on grounds of sartorial style.
Entertaining though it is, Kenny’s book contains far more than anecdote. Constructed as a historical survey, it effectively begins with Queen Victoria; the idea of Ireland becoming a separate Plantagenet kingdom under King John does not feature, though it might have evaded some future historical unpleasantnesses, such as the Elizabethan conquest and colonisation. Much interesting material is pulled out from the Royal Archives and contemporary newspapers, and a more rounded picture of Victoria’s relationship to Ireland emerges. While independent Ireland removed statues of the Queen-Empress from public display in Dublin and Cork (the latter being actually buried underground for several years), Prince Albert remains discreetly ensconced on the Merrion Square side of Dail Eireann, appropriately overseeing the Natural History Museum and the National Gallery: perhaps a symbol of the reconciliation of Ireland with Victorianism that never quite happened.
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