PRINCE CHARLES IS coming to Ireland next month for his first official visit since 2002.

He will be joined by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall for the four-day trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The trip is being undertaken between 19 and 22 May following a request from the British government.

Details of their itinerary are due to be released in the coming days but it is understood they will visit Sligo, where his great-uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten died.

Lord Mountbatten spent time during the summer months at Mullaghmore but was killed in an IRA bomb on 27 August 1979.

The pair’s visit will be the first by a member of the Royal Family since Queen Elizabeth II’s in 2011. It also comes a year after President Michael D Higgins made his historic State visit to Great Britain last year.

The news that the pair will visit “both parts of the island of Ireland” has been welcomed by the Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan.

“Following the reciprocal State Visits of recent years, this visit to Ireland will represent a further expression of the warm and friendly relations which now exist between us,” he said in a statement. 

“We look forward to their arrival next month, and to a visit programme which reflects the quality of these relations.”

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