With the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Ireland due to begin tomorrow, Tuesday May 17, the Lancashire born singer, songwriter and performer Steven Patrick Morrissey has written an article for Hot Press, which challenges in trenchant terms the appropriateness of welcoming the British monarch to Ireland

Morrissey, both of whose parents are Irish, dismisses the four-day visit as part of a new palace PR campaign to re-invent the Windsors. However, while Morrissey's opposition to the Royals is well known, there is a political dimension to his latest missive which will no doubt cause fury among the UK establishment – and find considerable resonance among Irish republicans.

"As recently as the turn of the 1980s," Morrissey says in the article, "the Queen supported Margaret Thatcher by not dismissing Thatcher as she allowed hunger strikers to die at the Maze Prison, most famously Bobby Sands, who was 27 years old."

Morrissey suggests that the Queen's silence at the time makes her culpable for Sands' death - and for those of the other hunger strikers.

"As Sands starved to death," he charges, "in protest at being tagged a 'criminal' and not a 'political prisoner' by the Thatcher government, the Queen sat in her Palace and said nothing."

While there are other fascinating aspects to what Morrissey has to say in his Hot Press polemic, the views he advances on the Irish political dimension are sure to raise the hackles of conservatives in both Britain and Ireland.


"The Queen also has the power to give back the six counties to the Irish people," he argues, "allowing Ireland to be a nation once again. The fact that she has not done so is Fascism in full flow."

The full article appears in the issue of Hot Press which hits the streets this Thursday, May 19.

Morrissey on the Queen's Visit to Ireland