With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Queen and ex-IRA leader meet

For decades, McGuinness was an avowed enemy of the British empire — a representative of a paramilitary group that in 1979 killed the queen’s beloved cousin Louis Mountbatten with a bomb planted on his fishing boat.

But in a potent sign of just how far the peace process in Northern Ireland has come, the queen and McGuinness, now deputy first minister in Northern Ireland’s provincial government, exchanged pleasantries at a meeting in Belfast that would have been difficult for McGuinness’s Irish nationalist party, Sinn Fein, to stomach even a few years ago.

“You could see it as a last piece in a jigsaw peace process which has been very slowly and carefully put together over 20 years,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, a professor of modern history at University College Dublin....

Read entire article at WaPo