The handshake in which hope and history rhymed with realism

OPINION: It suited Queen Elizabeth and Martin McGuinness to disguise pragmatism as principle, writes MAUREEN DOWD

OPINION:It suited Queen Elizabeth and Martin McGuinness to disguise pragmatism as principle, writes MAUREEN DOWD

IN THE HBO movie Game Change, about the 2008 US presidential campaign, John McCain’s strategist Steve Schmidt was appalled when he realised that the Republicans’ vice-presidential pick thought Queen Elizabeth, rather than the prime minister, was running the show in Britain. But with David Cameron growing smaller and the queen growing larger, Sarah Palin now seems prescient.

In leading a reconciliation with Ireland, reaching a white-gloved hand across the bloodstained tide, the queen has restored a lustre dimmed by her 1992 “annus horribilis” and her insensitivity after the death of Princess Diana.

Her elevation to Ireland’s Prodigal Mother began last year when Liz, as the Daily Star calls her, arrived for a four-day visit to the Republic – the first by a British monarch in a century – wearing an emerald green suit, surrounded by ladies-in-waiting not reading Fifty Shades of Grey but wearing 40 shades of green.

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The Irish immediately understood that the queen meant business. In this island of myth, superstition and symbol, where the past is always present, she urged both sides “to bow to the past but not be bound by it”. The mood was tentative at first but the ice broke when the monarch bowed her head at the Garden of Remembrance, the sacred ground for Irish patriots who died battling for independence; spoke some Irish; and visited Croke Park, the site of the 1920 Bloody Sunday, when 14 Irish civilians died after British forces opened fire on them. By the end of that visit, some Irish were waving Union Jacks and fondly calling her Betty on Twitter.

The skunk at the emotional garden party was Sinn Féin, which misread the national mood and maintained a sullen distance from the queen. (Sinn Féin lived up to its name, “We ourselves”.) Party president Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister for Northern Ireland, both former capos in the IRA, soon realised they had missed an opportunity to milk an opportunity.

After all, as one leading Irish journalist told me, “These are guys who would take the eye out of your head and say you’d look better without it.” They were also eager to exploit the economic recession, which has helped their poll numbers spike in the Republic, and realised they had misplayed the queen’s visit and needed to assuage their new, more moderate supporters.

So when the queen, the commander in chief of the British armed forces, visited Northern Ireland last week as part of her diamond jubilee celebrations, McGuinness, the former IRA commander, was ready to embrace this woman he had spent his life fighting, first violently and then politically.

It certainly took courage for McGuinness and the queen to confront the “rough beasts” who would cry treason in both their camps. But it also suited them to disguise pragmatism as principle.

So their historic – and hopeful – handshake last Wednesday at a charity art exhibition at a Belfast theatre had to be elaborately choreographed and minutely negotiated.

The queen had to move past the 1979 murder by the IRA of her cousin Lord Mountbatten and his 14-year-old grandson, who died when the boat they were on off Co Sligo was blown up. McGuinness, who was a leader of the IRA in Derry for some of the 1970s, had to move past the 1972 Bloody Sunday horror there, when British forces shot 26 innocent and unarmed civilians, killing 13 immediately, with another man dying months later.

(The 2010 Saville report said McGuinness “was probably armed with a Thompson submachine gun”. It concluded: “He did not engage in any activity that provided any of the soldiers with any justification for opening fire.”)

The queen took another symbolic step past the Troubles by making her first visit to a Roman Catholic church in Northern Ireland. A mesmerised country watched with a sense, as one television commentator put it, of: “My goodness, me.” There was a cascade of the words unthinkable, unimaginable and – for dead-enders – unspeakable. The queen, gracious once more in a green suit and hat the colour of bright spring shoots, offered a gloved hand and warm smile to the former guerrilla.

McGuinness spoke Irish to the queen, a blessing translated as “Goodbye and God speed”. Afterwards, getting into his car, he assured reporters “I’m still a republican” but added that the visit had been “very nice”. In a speech in Westminster on Thursday he said the moment could help define “a new relationship between Britain and Ireland and between the Irish people themselves”.

And “Martin and Lizzie’s love-in”, as the Phoenix magazine called it, was hailed by Adams as “a very, very good thing indeed”. “Will it be significant beyond the novelty or beyond the symbolism?” he asked. “That’s up to us.” Niall O’Dowd, editor of the Irish Voice and Irish Central website, was here and was struck by the utterly changed world.

“This will end Irish and British what-abouting,” he said. “What about my suffering? Who suffered the most in this conflict? We must just say one death was too many and all are responsible. There’s no moral high ground here.”