Gerry Adams will meet with Prince Charles in Ireland, making it the first public meeting between the Sinn Fein leader and a member of the British Royal Family.
The meeting will take place during Charles’ four-day tour of the Republic of Ireland with his wife Camilla. The tour begins Tuesday.
During the trip, Charles will also visit the village of Mullaghmore, where his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten was killed by an Irish Republican Army bomb during a boating trip in 1979.
At the time, Adams condoned the attack, saying, “What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people.”
Before he helped broker peace in Northern Ireland, Adams has long been associated with the IRA — once considered the armed wing of Sinn Fein. Today, Sinn Fein is Ireland’s second-largest opposition party.
The peace in Northern Ireland came after decades of bloody conflict between Protestant loyalists who wanted to stay part of the United Kingdom and Catholic nationalists who wanted to see the north united with Ireland.
The meeting with Charles is being viewed as another milestone in the fragile peace process.
“This was agreed to promote the process of resolving past injustices and promoting reconciliation and healing,” Sinn Fein Chariman Declan Kearney said on the party’s website.