A cordial handshake between Mary McAleese and Ian Paisley yesterday indicated the warmer relations that have developed since the DUP leader declared at his party conference last year that he did not like the President because she was "dishonest".
His comments were related to remarks made a year earlier by President McAleese when she likened anti-Catholic sectarianism in the north to anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. She later apologised for the remarks.
Last night, however, Dr Paisley and the President met to remember the sacrifices made by Irishmen, from north and south, in the first World War. The two met officially for the first time at the opening of an exhibition at the Somme Heritage Centre in Newtowards. Dr Paisley went forward to greet President McAleese when she arrived at the threshold of the centre and shook her hand.
Some photographers inside the building missed the shot but Dr Paisley and the President were happy to perform the simple act of friendship again for the cameras.
Dr Paisley said the Somme Centre was not for Northern Ireland alone but "to remember all the heroes of this entire island who died so that freedom should survive". He added: "Representatives of the whole of Ireland, including the President of the Irish Republic and myself as the political leader of Ulster, have come tonight to pay our tributes in unity to all those who fought and died for us all."
President McAleese remarked that in the past nationalist Ireland had not acknowledged the Irishmen who had fought in the Great War. But, she said, "we have restored them to the light of respect and of pride so that they have become a powerful, recovered, shared memory and indeed a wonderful healing".
