BELFAST: Queen Elizabeth II shook hands with former IRA commander Martin McGuinness yesterday in a landmark moment in the Northern Ireland peace process, Buckingham Palace said.
The initial handshake between the queen and McGuinness, who is now deputy first minister of the British province, took place away from the media spotlight behind closed doors in a Belfast theatre.
The two then shook hands a second time for the cameras as the queen left the building.
McGuinness held the monarch’s hand for a few moments, spoke to her in Irish and told her the words meant: “Goodbye and God speed.”
The meeting is seen as an important milestone in Anglo-Irish relations after three decades of sectarian violence, known as “The Troubles”, which largely ended with the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998.
A spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron said the handshake had “taken relations between the two countries to a new level”.
It comes on the second day of the queen’s visit to the province, which on Tuesday took her to Enniskillen, the scene of a notorious 1987 IRA bombing which killed 11 people.
McGuinness was a commander in the Irish Republican Army when the paramilitary group killed the queen’s cousin Louis Mountbatten in 1979 by bombing his boat while he was on holiday in County Sligo in the Republic of Ireland.
His Sinn Fein party, the political wing of the now-defunct IRA, continues to reject British rule of Northern Ireland.
In the eyes of republicans, the queen is commander-in-chief of an army that killed 13 people during a civil rights march in 1972, an event known as Bloody Sunday.
Earlier this week McGuinness said that by shaking the queen’s hand he would be “shaking the hands of hundreds of thousands of unionists”. — AFP