The remembrance will be held on a grassy hill overlooking the Atlantic waters where the IRA bomb exploded on a clear sunny morning 40 years ago, killing Lord Louis Mountbatten and three companions.
There will be prayers and hymns, recollections and tributes, messages and flowers, a small, intimate affair.
But for Mullaghmore, a village in County Sligo on Ireland’s north-west coast, it may feel on Tuesday as if the whole world is watching. And perhaps judging.
Fascination with that terrible day on 27 August 1979 is so enduring that residents wonder if Mullaghmore will forever be deemed synonymous with atrocity.
“I’d prefer that we could be left alone,” said Joe McGowan, 80, a local historian and author. “It’s like picking at a scab, these anniversaries. And it keeps getting resurrected again. It shouldn’t be forgotten but it shouldn’t be promoted either.”
Instead of celebrating Mullaghmore’s beauty an endless stream of books, documentaries and articles – including this one – stigmatise the community and force it to revisit the tragedy, said McGowan. “You’re a plague. We get our snouts pushed into it whether we want to or not.”
Fr Christy McHugh, the parish priest, said Mullaghmore faced a dilemma. “It should not be glossed over. It’s part of our history and we shouldn’t let it slide by. But it has cast such an awful cloud over the place that we seem forever associated with it.”
The IRA planted a bomb on Mountbatten’s fishing boat, Shadow V, detonated by remote control. The blast killed Mountbatten, 79, along with his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, 14, a boat boy named Paul Maxwell, 15, and Lady Doreen Brabourne, 83. Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia, her husband John and their son Timothy, Nicholas’s twin, were injured but survived.
The IRA called Mountbatten’s murder an “execution”.
The death of the Queen’s second cousin – the last viceroy of India – was so shocking it attracted more global attention than a separate IRA ambush that killed 18 British soldiers a few hours later at Warrenpoint, 120 miles away.
Mountbatten was royalty, a historic figure, and he was targeted with his family in a scenic idyll that had seemed remote from the Troubles.
Mullaghmore has a handsome stone harbour framed by Ben Bulben mountain. The Mountbattens used to summer at Classiebawn Castle, a baronial mansion overlooking the village.
The killers were outsiders from the IRA’s south Armagh unit. There is no evidence Mullaghmore residents had any involvement. They helped the survivors and grieved for the dead.
“When I heard the bang I thought maybe it was a gas cylinder,” recalled Peter McHugh, 64, who was a friend of Maxwell and knew the Mountbattens.
McHugh joined the little flotilla that sped to the scene. “We did what we could – took the casualties from the water, brought them ashore. We were in total shock, we just reacted. You go on autopilot and keep on going.”
Irish security forces, British police, royal family representatives and the world’s press descended, turning the Pier Head hotel into an operations centre.
They left but grief and an “air of gloom” stayed for many years, said McHugh. One symptom was the fall in the number of Protestant holidaymakers from Northern Ireland, he said. “Things never went back to normal.”
Charles, the Prince of Wales, helped draw a line under the atrocity during a poignant visit with the Duchess of Cornwall and Timothy Knatchbull in 2015. The prince spoke of reconciliation and called Mountbatten the grandfather he never had.
“That was a huge moment in the healing history of these islands,” said Fr McHugh. “That fact that he came showed things had moved on.”
Four years later Mullaghmore knows there is no fully escaping history.
In the run-up to the anniversary a BBC TV documentary included gut-wrenching testimony from relatives of the victims, plus a claim from a former IRA member that Martin McGuinness, the late Sinn Féin leader, was the IRA commander who gave the green light.
The Mail on Sunday reported a separate claim that an SAS hit squad tracked down and killed Francis McGirl, one of the alleged bombers, in 1995 and made it resemble an accident.
Netflix is likely to shine a fresh spotlight on Mullaghmore in the third series of The Crown which launches in November and brings the story of the royal family into the 1970s. Charles Dance reportedly plays Mountbatten.
Tourists enjoying sun and ice-cream by the harbour last week said they were aware of what unfolded there in 1979.
“It’s still shocking. It makes you feel very sad,” said Peter Torney, 52, from Omagh, a Co Tyrone town that suffered its own devastating bombing. “What happened here was stupidity,” said his wife, Michelle, 53. “It was like everything that happened over the years – shouldn’t have happened, end of.”
There are three physical memorials: a small cross on a hillside, a bench in a peace garden and a plaque in the grounds of Classiebawn Castle. The property passed to different owners but the gates still have the Mountbatten initials.
It is right to remember Mountbatten and his companions, said McGowan, the historian. He has written about them on his blog.
But there is inequality in death, he said. Margaret Perry, a young woman murdered and buried in Mullaghmore in 1992, is a forgotten victim of the Troubles, he said. “Who comes for her anniversary? Do you need a title to be remembered?”
