| Queen To Visit Northern Ireland On Maundy Thursday |
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| Written by Joanne Leyland | |
| Friday, 01 February 2008 | |
 Buckingham
Palace has announced that the Queen will visit Northern Ireland on March 20th
for this year’s Maundy Thursday ceremony.Although she won’t turn 82 until a month later, on April 21st, the Queen will follow tradition by handing out Maundy purses to local pensioners in which are contained coins which mount up to the denote the age of the monarch in the year in which they were presented. This will be the 53rd time that Elizabeth II has overseen the ceremony, which is annually held on the Thursday of Holy Week to mark the Last Supper of Christ. 
A vicitim of the decades long Troubles include the Queen's own 'Uncle Dickie', Lord Louis Mountbatten of Burma, who was killed by an IRA bomb as he holidayed in the province in August 1979. Previously sensitive documentes which were recently released under the 30-year rule revealed that the Queen had told the then British Prime Minister, James Callaghan, that in relation to her Silver Jubilee tour of 1977 "she understood the aspirations of the Irish people and did not regard the visit as complete if it were limited only to contacts with the majority."
The Queen herself last visited the province in October 2006 for a historic ceremony at which she presented the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross to the Royal Irish Regiment. Comment on this article
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