Sinn Féin’s vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, is to attend the coronation of King Charles, marking another step away from the party’s strict Irish republican heritage. O’Neill said on Wednesday that she had accepted an invitation to attend the 6 May ceremony in London in order to further peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. “We are living in a time of great change. A time to respect our differing and equally legitimate aspirations, a time to firmly focus on the future and the opportunities that the next decade will bring,” O’Neill said in a statement. “I am an Irish republican. I also recognise there are many people on our island for whom the coronation is a hugely important occasion. I am committed to being a first minister for all, representing the whole community, building good relations between the people of these islands, and advancing peace and reconciliation through respectful and mature engagement.”
Sinn Féin overtook the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) as the biggest party in assembly elections last year, making its leader in Northern Ireland the region’s putative first minister. The party’s president, Mary Lou McDonald, is based in Dublin. A DUP boycott of power-sharing has paralysed Stormont and prevented O’Neill becoming first minister. Alex Maskey, Sinn Féin’s speaker of the assembly, will accompany O’Neill. Their attendance will underline the party’s distancing from previous republican orthodoxy. As an IRA mouthpiece during the Troubles, it condemned the royal family as part of a colonial “war machine” and celebrated the 1979 assassination of Lord Mountbatten. O’Neill has angered unionists and others in Northern Ireland by saying there had been “no alternative” to the IRA campaign, which killed about half of the 3,700 people who died during the Troubles. Maskey and O’Neill met King Charles in Belfast last September. O’Neill attended the Queen’s funeral service in London the same month. Her predecessor Martin McGuinness broke the republican taboo when he shook the queen’s hand in 2012.