Queen may meet Sinn Fein in Ulster peace milestone

DUBLIN (AP) — The former Irish Republican Army commander in Northern Ireland's government may meet Queen Elizabeth II next month in what would be a final milestone on the path to peace, senior officials in the territory's Catholic-Protestant government said.

In an unprecedented departure from security protocol, Buckingham Palace announced Thursday that the queen and her husband, Prince Philip, will visit Belfast and the Northern Ireland lakeside town of Enniskillen on June 26-27 as part of her United Kingdom-wide tour to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee, her 60th year on the throne.

The queen has regularly visited Northern Ireland throughout most of the past four decades of bloodshed over the British territory, but none of her previous visits had been announced even a minute in advance to minimize the risk that one or more IRA factions might try to attack her. The threat was very real, as evidenced by the Provisional IRA's 1979 assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Philip's 79-year-old uncle, and several small IRA splinter groups still pose a potential threat to the British royal family today.

But officials and analysts say political reconciliation has advanced at a surprising pace since 2005, when the Provisional IRA renounced violence and disarmed, and 2007, when the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party entered a power-sharing government alongside Northern Ireland's British Protestant majority. Their long-unthinkable coalition has proved remarkably stable.

Sinn Fein leaders declined to meet the queen last year during her first state visit to the neighboring Republic of Ireland, arguing it was still too soon. But Martin McGuinness — the Sinn Fein deputy leader of the Northern Ireland government and a former Provisional commander — since has dropped repeated hints that the next time Elizabeth sets foot in Northern Ireland, he and other former anti-British militants could bury the hatchet and meet her.

McGuinness' Protestant colleague atop the coalition, First Minister Peter Robinson, said both Sinn Fein and the queen had painful reasons to avoid seeing each other, but he expected it would happen.

"There is no doubt it would be a difficult decision to be taken both by her majesty and by Sinn Fein. There's a lot of history, but the history is on both sides in these issues," Robinson said outside Stormont Castle in east Belfast, the power-sharing center that the queen is expected to visit.

Robinson lauded Buckingham Palace's open announcement as evidence of profound social progress.

"In the past, only a select few got to greet her majesty the queen and most people would have been unaware that a visit was even taking place," Robinson said, adding, " The public will have the best opportunity in my lifetime to be able to see and greet her majesty the queen. This is testimony to the changed times in which we live."

Belfast historian Eamon Phoenix said the Irish Catholic minority was increasingly at ease with their Protestant rivals' British identity and would welcome a Sinn Fein rapprochement with the enduring 86-year-old monarch. He noted that Irish nationalists demonstrated "adulation" towards the queen during her triumphant and trouble-free four-day visit to the Irish Republic a year ago.

Other analysts noted other signs that Sinn Fein wants to accept the British side of Northern Ireland, or at least treat it with newfound respect. Earlier this month, McGuinness told fellow lawmakers in the Northern Ireland Assembly he comes from Northern Ireland's second-largest city, "Londonderry" — the city's official legal name, but one that Irish nationalists have rejected and refused to say for centuries in favor of its pre-British name of Derry.

In March, McGuinness told Irish state broadcasters RTE he was considering meeting the queen — an inconceivable idea two decades ago when he stood atop an underground army still plotting bombings and shootings.

"I want to be a deputy first minister for everybody: for the unionist people, for the loyalist people, for the Protestants and the dissenters, and those who don't believe in anything," he said then.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, who has no role in the Northern Ireland and instead leads the party's lawmakers in the Republic of Ireland parliament, said this week that the entire Sinn Fein executive committee would have to vote to end the party's boycott on contact with British royals.

In another sign of the likely symbolic power of the queen's June visit, Buckingam Palace said she would visit Enniskillen, a normally easygoing lakelands town synonymous with one of the Provisional IRA's worst acts of civilian slaughter. In November 1987, a no-warning bomb exploded in the center of town during an annual ceremony commemorating British war dead from the two world wars, killing 11 Protestant civilians and wounding 63 others.

The Provisional IRA initially tried to blame British authorities for triggering a premature explosion, then admitted the blast went off as planned. Worldwide revulsion over the attack — and the stunning Christian forgiveness displayed by Gordon Wilson, father of a young nurse slain in the bombing — were later credited with inspiring Adams and McGuinness to begin teasing out cease-fire terms in secret with British agents and intermediaries.