Every year on Christmas Day, Queen Elizabeth II delivers a holiday message. Mindful of the separation of crown and government, she has dwelt on generalities and ignored politics. Not this year. Although she did not mention the Irish Republican Army by name, the monarch warned that sectarian differences had "corroded into intolerance, bigotry and violence" and pleaded for "tolerance, not terrorism."
The Queen thus joined her subjects in Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, in expressing revulsion at the I.R.A. bombing in Enniskillen last November that resulted in the deaths of eleven civilians. The I.R.A. struck again last week: John McMichael,...