SHAWN POGATCHNIK
ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland (AP) – Queen Elizabeth II arrived Tuesday in Northern Ireland to celebrate the British territory’s hard-won peace in a town that suffered one of the IRA’s worst massacres – and inspired its greatest moment of Christian forgiveness.
The monarch’s planned meeting Wednesday with former Irish Republican Army commander Martin McGuinness comes the day after her visit to Enniskillen, where a no-warning IRA bomb in 1987 killed 11 Protestant civilians and wounded 63 others as they commemorated British dead from the two world wars.
Widespread revulsion at the Enniskillen slaughter spurred McGuinness and other IRA chiefs to begin sounding out peace terms with Britain. That quarter-century journey is to end with a Belfast handshake.
But first the queen is highlighting the impressive resilience of Enniskillen, whose British Protestant and Irish Catholic residents long avoided succumbing to the worst of Northern Ireland’s sectarian passions. The pretty lakeside town, renowned for its fishing and its easy-going civility, barely featured in the conflict before that terrible Sunday morning in November 1987, when an IRA bomb beside the town’s war memorial buried a crowd of Protestant families in rubble – and one of its survivors moved the world as he described saying goodbye to his dying daughter beside him.