King Charles makes first official visit to Northern Ireland at a fraught time

King Charles III will meet some of the United Kingdom’s most loyal subjects when he visits Northern Ireland on Tuesday at a time of deep political crisis and profound demographic change in the 101-year-old region.

Mourners on Belfast’s Shankill Road, the centre of the largely Protestant, unionist community that cherishes its British identity, blinked back tears as they laid flowers at a giant mural to honour the late Queen Elizabeth II who was born five years after Ireland was partitioned in 1921.

“This is a country with so much bad politics but a big, big heart for Queen and country,” said Lee Williams, who met her as a boy on a trip to Buckingham Palace where his father served as a Welsh Guardsman. “It’s who we are.”

Nationalist leaders who want to see the region reunited with the Republic of Ireland have joined unionists in praising the Queen for pursuing reconciliation on an island scarred by violence, including the three decades-long Troubles in Northern Ireland involving republican IRA and loyalist paramilitaries.

But that is just about all they can agree about.

While King Charles will be greeted by political and religious leaders and receive a message of condolence from the speaker of the Stormont Assembly on Tuesday, the Northern Ireland region has no functioning devolved executive.

The Democratic Unionist Party, the biggest pro-UK political force, has paralysed political institutions for months to force changes to post-Brexit trading rules for the region.

After Sinn Féin triumphed in elections in May — the first elections in the region’s history not to be won by unionists — the DUP’s boycott has thwarted the formation of a new executive under a nationalist first minister.

“Unionist leaders have not enabled Northern Ireland to have its own government at a time when the monarch visits, someone who means so much to them, sentimentally as well as politically. For them not to be sitting [at Stormont] is quite shameful,” said Connal Parr, a history lecturer at Northumbria University.

The latest census data due next week are expected to show for the first time that Catholics outnumber Protestants, in a region expressly created to perpetuate a protestant majority and where for many, identity, religion and politics remain tightly bound.

Bongani Ambrose, a taxi driver who fled Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and has been living in Northern Ireland for 13 years, felt that King Charles “will do well as long as he doesn’t cross into politics.”

Both sides of the region’s enduring divides paid tribute to Queen Elizabeth’s deft forays into the minefields of the region.

Her historic state visit to Ireland in 2011 was “a mission of forgiveness,” according to the Northern Irish-born former president Mary McAleese, who hosted her at Dublin Castle.

On that trip, the Queen spoke in Irish, bowed her head at a memorial service for those who died fighting British rule, and expressed regret and recalled personal loss — a reference to the IRA’s murder of her husband’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten and his 14-year-old grandson in 1979. She said both sides needed to be “able to bow to the past but not be bound by it.”

The following year, she shook hands with former IRA commander-turned-deputy first minister Martin McGuinness during a visit to Belfast.

However, even as unionists lowered Union flags to half mast and prepared to replace bunting with black ribbons this week, Sinn Féin was urging people to attend a consultation on the future of Ireland on October 12.

That is part of a process it hopes will lead to a referendum on reunification within a decade, although polls show a majority of people in the region still want Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom.

“The union is definitely under threat, but I don’t think [reunification] will happen — too many of us here love our country,” said Elizabeth Salton, 61, a retired bartender, paying her respects on the Shankill Road.

Elaine Little, 55, a cleaner, agreed that the Queen’s death “would make people cling to their Britishness, definitely”.

But with Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon pushing for a new independence referendum, “[King Charles] won’t be able to hold the union together as well as the Queen,” said Lynn McKinnie, a 33-year-old make-up artist from Glasgow, who was visiting the Shankill.

One nationalist, who gave her name only as Eileen, said “eventually [reunification] is going to come, it has to”. She had just said a prayer for the royal family at the Clonard monastery in Belfast, where secret talks between nationalist leader John Hume and Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Féin, a party then seen as the political wing of the IRA, eventually helped pave the way for the landmark Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Many nationalists gave little attention to the Queen’s death although some residents reported isolated outbreaks of cheering and fireworks at the news of her death. Police in Northern Ireland said they were investigating an incident in a bar on Saturday night, captured on videos circulating on social media, of anti-Queen chanting.

For Mervyn Gibson, the grand secretary of the loyalist Orange Order known for its annual marches to celebrate the Protestant King William’s victory over the Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the change of monarch marks a “new beginning”.

“We have to begin to sell the union more to soft nationalists,” he said, “And maybe this is the time to do it. It gives us the opportunity to recalibrate”.