FILE - A couple pay their respect at a picture of Queen Elizabeth II on the Loyalist Shankill Road in west Belfast, Sept. 10, 2022. Britain's longest-reigning monarch and a rock of stability across much of a turbulent century, died Sept. 8, 2022. – It’s less than ten minutes walk from the Falls Road to the Shankill Road in Northern Ireland's capital, where Catholics and Protestants still live in segregated enclaves.
On the street residents call The Shankill -- center of a Protestant neighborhood with a long history of loyalty to the crown -- British flags fluttered over shops and from light poles. At the foot of a giant mural of a young Elizabeth II proclaiming her “the people’s monarch,” many proud to be her subjects came bearing flowers and notes of emotional farewell.
Charles is “not our king. Bobby Sands was our king here,” said 52-year-old Bobby Jones. “Queen never done nothing for us. Never did. None of the royals do.”Walker and others said Queen Elizabeth II had earned a measure of respect, if never affection, for her decision in 2012 to shake hands with Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander who went on to serve as Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister. But Charles is unwelcome.
The queen, he said, “felt deeply, I know, the significance of the role she herself played in bringing together those whom history had separated, and in extending a hand to make possible the healing of long-held hurts.” “Army in Control Here For At Least Four Months,” warned the front page of The Irish News, now displayed in a museum of IRA history just off the Falls Road.A few minutes in either neighborhood is all it takes to unearth memories of the violence and the gaping divide over the role of the British government.
The royal family was not immune to the violence. In 1979, the IRA assassinated Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the queen and mentor to Charles , detonating a bomb planted aboard his fishing boat. Three others also died.
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