In the coming weeks, Ireland will host two of the world’s most recognizable VIPs: Queen Elizabeth II and President Barack Obama. And as the country gets ready, the taxi drivers of Dublin are seeing the careful – and sometimes inconvenient – preparations up close. “The police have been down every manhole in Dublin twice at this stage,” says one, describing the increase in security that includes the inspection of the city’s sewers for bombs.
Ireland is taking no chances with its high-profile guests: reports say that around 10,000 police officers and military personnel will be deployed over the course of the two visits. But it is the Queen’s arrival in Dublin on Tuesday that makes the Irish police force most nervous. Not everyone in Ireland is happy to see the Queen, whose four-day visit – the first ever by a British monarch to the Republic – has put into action the state’s biggest-ever security operation. (See pictures of the world’s most beautiful tiaras.)
The reluctance of the Queen and her father King George VI before her to visit England’s closest neighbor stems from centuries of British occupation of Ireland. While the Republic of Ireland fought its
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