Even after a woman heckled her in Northern Ireland, Kate Middleton remained calm and composed. The Princess of Wales was in Northern Ireland for a royal engagement alongside her husband, Prince William, when the incident happened.
On Thursday, Kate and William were greeting well-wishers outside Carrickfergus Castle, when a woman told her that she should have stayed in her own country.
In the widely circulated video, Kate can be seen reaching her hand out to greet the woman, who was also recording the incident on her phone, but the woman’s attitude toward the princess changed, and she started to bully her and be disrespectful.
After she told the princess the unsettling words, Kate smiled graciously and moved on to shake the hands of other people gathered there. However, the woman was not done with Kate and continued to say that Ireland belonged to the Irish people.
In the video, the Prince of Wales does not seem to notice the encounter between his wife and the stranger.
October 6 was the first time the couple visited Northern Ireland as the new Prince and Princess of Wales after they inherited the titles from King Charles when Queen Elizabeth II passed away.
Tensions between the Irish and the British have run high for centuries, and the late queen spoke about the political tensions between the two countries in 2011.
Queen Elizabeth II said that the fact that some of the UK’s islands had experienced a lot of turbulence, heartache, and loss was very sad and regrettable. She said that she wished that the UK had done things differently in the past or that they had not done them at all. The late monarch extended her sympathies to all countries affected by the UK’s actions.
The day before Kate’s awkward encounter with the Irish woman, she had visited the Royal Surrey County Hospital. Her visit was focused on the hospital’s maternity wing, where she met with new mothers and the hospital staff. Prince William visited St. George’s Park in Staffordshire, where he spoke with young athletes and para footballers.
Apart from the heckling incident, Kate and William had a fantastic day on Thursday. The couple visited the Public Initiative for Suicide Prevention, a mental health support charity that works around the community to help prevent suicides. They then went to Belfast’s Trade Market, where they had a cocktail-making competition before making their way to the town of Carrickfergus.
With Queen Elizabeth’s mourning period ending after her state funeral, members of the royal family are also returning to their busy schedules. The Duke of Cambridge (Prince William), now first in line to inherit the English throne, spoke highly of his late grandmother at the United for Wildlife Global Summit.
He said that his grandmother and father were committed naturalists, and they taught him from a young age that nature was one of the world’s greatest assets.
Although the Prince and Princess of Wales did not publicly comment on the incident, they released a video on their Twitter handle at the end of the day on October 6, thanking Northern Ireland for a wonderful visit.
