Fishmonger Pat O'Connell shows his wares to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during a visit to the English Market in Cork, Ireland, Friday. AP
Queen’s speech refers to history of ‘heartache and loss’ as demonstrators held back from Dublin Castle
Stephen Bates and Henry McDonald | The Guardian | Thursday 19 May 2011
The Queen offered Ireland the nearest the royal family has ever come to an apology for Britain’s actions in the tortured relations between the two countries, in a speech at a state banquet Dublin.
She told guests from the northern and southern Irish communities: “It is a sad and regrettable reality that through history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss … with the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we wish had been done differently, or not at all.”
A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998 – Gillian Clarke
An old ewe that somehow till this year
Had given the ram the slip. We thought her barren.
Good Friday, and the Irish peace deal close,
and tonight she’s serious, restless and hoofing the straw.
We put off the quiet supper and bottle of wine
we’d planned, to celebrate if the news is good.
Her waters broke an hour ago and she’s sipped
her own lost salty ocean from the ground.
While they slog it out in Belfast, eight decades
since Easter 1916, exhausted, tamed by pain,
she licks my fingers with a burning tongue,
lies down again. Two hooves and a muzzle.
But the lamb won’t come. You can phone for help
and step into the lane to watch for car lights.
This is when the whitecoats come to the women,
well-meaning, knowing best, with their needles and forceps.
So I ease my fingers in, take the slippery head
in my right hand, two hooves in my left.
We strain together, harder than we dared.
I feel a creak in the limbs and pull till he comes
in a syrupy flood. She drinks him, famished, and you find us
peaceful, at a cradling that might have been a death.
Then the second lamb slips through her opened door,
the stone rolled away.
Great literary content, and a joy to see Queen Elizabeth wearing the green. I admire her connections with nature and for showing us example by planting trees where they are needed. I would have to study long and hard to understand all this, but for now will have to wait until Piers Morgan interviews the Queen on CNN…not 😆