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.
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