So, the Queen entertained for dinner at Windsor not only the amiable president of the Republic of Ireland, Michael Higgins (who had earlier addressed both houses of parliament), but also the former IRA commander Martin McGuinness.
Predictably, and understandably, relatives of people who had been killed by the IRA, in Birmingham and elsewhere, protested outside Windsor Castle, claiming that this was a manifest act of injustice and an insult to those who had been murdered. Justice demanded that McGuinness should now be behind bars. This comes after the discovery in February that around 200 letters had been sent out by the Northern Ireland Office to people previously wanted as IRA members, telling them that they were no longer being sought.
Has there been a general amnesty for ex-IRA members? "Amnesty" literally means a deliberate act of forgetfulness of the past, but it is used almost exclusively in political contexts, to mean that no further action will be taken against previous enemies or as if the incident had not occurred.
And of course one cannot deliberately forget things, though one can deliberately behave as if one had forgotten, or even as if they had never occurred. But there are deeply difficult problems in deciding what should be the official and public attitude to the past.
There is nothing easier or less significant than apologising to former colonies for, centuries ago, having colonised them; nothing more futile than now expressing regret for our ancestors' actions that were then regarded as normal, though would now be condemned. But there are some events so horrible that it is impossible to say, in effect "we'll say no more about it".
We need think no further than the Holocaust, and the difficulty the German people have had in facing their own past, let alone that of the Jewish community in not regarding themselves as for ever a special case because of their then appalling sufferings.
Most recently, Rwanda deliberately and bravely chose the attitude it was going to adopt towards the massacres of 20 years ago. Of course those vast numbers whose lives had been affected, whether as perpetrators or as orphans, would not forget; but a public decision had been taken; a joint performative act carried out. And because it was an act it will have consequences.
In the case of the Windsor dinner, I believe the Queen was right. I happened to have been in Ireland on the day after McGuinness became minister for education and, meeting him at an educational conference, I was astonished at that time to be shaking hands with someone I still thought of as a senior member of the IRA, a man who had probably carried a gun.
But times have changed; and this was indeed the burden of President Higgins's remarks to parliament on Tuesday. It was after all part of the Good Friday agreement, that if both the north and the south of Ireland so wished, in future there might be unification. And I have noticed an increasing tendency for people in conversation to speak of the two as one.
Of course, we cannot overlook the horrors of the Orange marches, nor the continuing hatred between Catholics and Protestants.
Though people sometimes talk as if the Troubles began in the 1970s, this is far from true. They were centuries old; and the Irish have extraordinarily long memories. (I did not live for nearly 50 years with an atheist but fanatically Protestant Ulsterman without becoming aware of this.)
If we still feel a bit queasy about Gerry Adams we should pretend that we do not, and trust McGuinness to have changed his ways.
