Prince Charles has shaken hands with Gerry Adams, the veteran Irish republican who former comrades allege was on the IRA’s ruling army council when the Provisionals murdered the prince’s great uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1979.
In a historic moment for Anglo-Irish affairs, Charles met the Sinn Féin leader who once justified the Mountbatten murder.
The pair smiled at each other as they shook hands for 13 seconds inside a packed hall on the campus of the National University of Ireland Galway. They exchanged a few words, with the prince holding a cup of tea in one hand and shaking Adams’ hand with the other.
The prince and the Sinn Féin president were meeting on Tuesday, the first day of a symbolically loaded royal visit to the republic and Northern Ireland. It was Adams’ first meeting with a royal family member.
For Charles, the handshake was hugely poignant given that it was the Provisional IRA who murdered Mountbatten, his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, 14, local 15-year-old Paul Maxwell, and the Lady Doreen Brabourne, who died two days later from her injuries. The IRA detonated a bomb by remote control which destroyed Mountbatten’s boat in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, on 27 August 1979.
On Wednesday, Charles will visit the site of the killing. At the time Adams, then a rising figure in the republican movement, said: “With his war record, I don’t think [Mountbatten] could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation. He knew the danger involved in coming to this country.”
In 1979, republican veterans say Adams and Martin McGuinness, who also attended Tuesday’s event in Galway, were members of the IRA’s supreme decision-making body, the army council. Adams has always insisted he was never in the IRA; a claim derided by former comrades.
As he arrived at the college around midday, Adams said he hoped the meeting would also contribute to reconciliation in Northern Ireland for the royals.
“I don’t have any expectations other than this being an engagement which I hope is symbolic and practical, and will assist that entire process,” he said. “It will, by its nature, be a relatively short engagement.
But I don’t buy into not shaking hands.”
Crowds were thin on the ground to greet Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall when they arrived in the city via Shannon airport. There was a huge security cordon around the university with some roads blocked off for several hours.
In the centre of Galway city on Tuesday morning there was a small, muted protest against the visit. About 10 members of the hardline Republican Sinn Féin and the Galway Anti-Monarchy group stood with flags, posters and banners, one of which read: “Millions Spent on Royalty in Age of Austerity”. Garda officers kept a watch on the peaceful protest, which started at around 10am.
In the main shopping area there were only a few symbols of dissent, with one poster stuck on a public ashtray near a pub reading: “We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser”, a reference to the period building up to the republican 1916 Easter Rising. Some shops, meanwhile, were hoping to cash in on the visit, with theone department store flying both the Irish Tricolour and the Union flag from above its entrance.
Meanwhile, relatives of those killed by the Parachute Regiment on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 held a protest close to the spot in the city where many of the civilians were shot dead. A number of them criticised Adams for meeting the prince because he is colonel in chief of the regiment.
Linda Nash, whose brother William was killed, told the Guardian: “Adams doesn’t matter to me at all. It concerns me that Prince Charles, the colonel in chief of the Parachute Regiment is welcomed at all in Ireland. During the Bloody Sunday justice campaign I protested many times when the paras were stationed in Palace Barracks [in Holywood, County Down] and when Prince Charles came to Dublin. Adams and McGuinness already know I’m on record as calling them traitors.”
• This article was amended on Tuesday 19 May 2015. Lord Mountbatten’s grandson Ncholas Knatchbull died in the IRA attack in Mullaghmore on 27 August 1979, not his twin brother Timothy as an earlier version of this article said.
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