Queen Elizabeth travelled to Dublin for the first time during her royal reign Tuesday, becoming the first British monarch in a century to visit the Republic of Ireland.
Dressed in green for the start of her historic visit, the Queen and her husband, Prince Philip, were greeted by Irish Army commanders and an honour guard at a military airstrip outside the capital.
Irish President Mary McAleese called the Queen's pending visit "an extraordinary moment in Irish history," which will see the 85-year-old monarch travel to Kildare, Tipperary and Cork, in addition to her stop in Dublin.
After landing in Dublin, the Queen met with McAleese at Aras An Uachtarain, the Irish president's official residence in Phoenix Park.
The Queen then went into central Dublin to lay a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance, a memorial that honours two centuries of Ireland's rebel dead.
CTV's London Bureau Chief Tom Kennedy said the Queen's decision to lay a wreath was among the strongest gestures of reconciliation she could offer to the Irish people.
Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said the visit was "the start of an entirely new beginning for Ireland and Britain" and he wished that the welcome the Queen gets "will be genuine and memorable for her."
Tight security surrounds Queen
And while the Queen's four-day visit is largely popular with the Irish public, officials have put an unprecedented security detail in place while she is in the country, leaving little opportunity for protesters or IRA dissidents to disrupt the proceedings.
"Because there is such a concern over security, the Queen is almost completely insulated from the general population here," Kennedy told CTV News Channel from Dublin.
"It's very interesting seeing her being driven around the streets of Dublin and those streets are virtually empty."
When the Queen was at the Garden of Remembrance, a group of anti-British protesters scuffed with police several hundred metres from the memorial. Police successfully moved the group to a fenced-off area and no serious injuries were reported.
Thousands of police officers stood guard in central Dublin on Tuesday, and arrangements have been made for her to travel the country in a bomb-resistant Range Rover.
Irish police were also investigating the origins of a small bomb found Tuesday morning on a bus in Maynooth, a university town west of Dublin, as well as a hoax device discovered near Dublin's light-rail line in the western district of Inchicore.
Long lapse between royal visits
Before the Queen's arrival on Tuesday, no British monarch had visited Ireland since it gained independence from the United Kingdom.
The two nations held frosty relations with one another in the decades that followed and Ireland dropped its symbolic ties with Britain in 1949 when it declared itself a republic.
But the two governments gradually found common cause during the long years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland that claimed lives on both sides of the Irish border. Their co-operation was integral in the eventual 1998 Good Friday peace accord that lead to IRA disarmament and a stable Catholic-Protestant government in Belfast.
British Prime Minister David Cameron will also travel to Ireland during the Queen's historic visit. He is scheduled to arrive in Dublin on Wednesday.
Cameron recently said the success of Northern Ireland peacemaking was allowing "the natural friendship, comradeship, shared experiences and warmth that we have for each other (to) really come out."
He said the Queen's tour of Ireland would "be a huge step forward for that process."
The close ties between the two countries have also been evident in recent months as Britain has pressed fellow European Union members to cut Ireland some slack as it wrestles with massive debt problems.
The British government led by Cameron also offered Ireland a particularly low-interest loan, citing Ireland's economic revival as a strategic British interest.
With files from The Associated Press
