Historic handshake between Elizabeth II and Martin McGuinness (2012)

The 2012 handshake between Elizabeth II and Martin McGuinness brought a former IRA leader and the British monarch into a single, highly visible encounter. The book marks it as a historic gesture within the longer shift from armed struggle toward political engagement, while the fact that Marian Price remained in prison offers a stark reminder that this transition did not resolve every conflict or consequence.

The Encounter

The surviving references identify the central action plainly: Elizabeth II shook Martin McGuinness’s hand in 2012. They do not provide the setting, the words exchanged, or the participants’ reactions, so the event’s significance rests here on the identities brought together and on the book’s placement of the handshake within its account of political change.

From Protest to Political Strategy

The handshake belongs to a history in which peaceful protest and armed action had both been pursued as routes to change. In 1969, student marchers set out from Belfast to Derry to protest discrimination against Catholics; some believed peaceful protest could redraw the conflict’s divisions, but the violence at Burntollet Bridge helped convince Dolours Price that marching alone would not bring the change Ireland needed. In 1971, she joined the IRA as a full member, insisting that she wanted a fighting role rather than a place in its female auxiliary.

The book also traces a later turn toward electoral politics. After Bobby Sands’s candidacy from prison helped make an electoral strategy newly consequential, Price canvassed for Gerry Adams in 1983 and drove voters to polling stations. The handshake between Elizabeth II and Martin McGuinness appears against this larger movement from protest and armed action toward political participation and public contact across a former divide.

A Gesture Amid Unfinished Consequences

The book’s brief reference to the handshake sits beside another fact about 2012: Marian Price was still in prison. That contrast keeps the encounter from standing as a simple resolution. The handshake could register a changed political landscape, but its appearance alongside continuing imprisonment shows that the legacies of the conflict remained present even as political relationships took new forms.